On join-lemmy.org, the project is described as “A forum and link aggregator for the Fediverse”. In the previous post, multiple people mentioned that this is not a good description. However I have a hard time coming up with anything better.
So please post your suggestions below, and upvote the ones which are both accurate and easy to understand for new users. Later I pick one of the most upvoted options for the website.
By the way the second title “Follow communities Anywhere in the world” will likely go away (see the pull request for frontpage redesign). After this is decided I may also make another post to get suggestions for the longer description text below (“Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. …”).
Edit: Please only post concrete suggestions in top-level comments, and use replies to discuss. And here you can see how a few other Fediverse projects do it:
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“You remember when people were generally nice on the internet?”
The best sentence will depend on the target audience. Is there a way to know who would be that audience?
Also, responding more directly to your question, I’ve got a frame challenge: What about two or three short sentences, like what Mastodon does?
A platform that is truly democratic. You choose your feed. You choose where to host your account.
A platform where you’re truly free. You choose your feed. You choose where to host your account.
A platform that can’t enshittify. You choose your feed. You choose where to host your account.
That third one I like, because it’s a differentiator that Lemmy has in comparison with ButterflyX or whatever Jack the Twitter Guy is working on right now; Lemmy is not at risk of enshitifying, unlike ButterflyX.
Also, if it’s important to differentiate Lemmy from Mastodon or other Fediverse platforms, the sentences could start with “A discussion platform”.
Also, here’s a take where I tried to make no reference to electronics:
A bustling room filled with tables, each filled with people talking about what they find interesting, where the conversation topics are always chosen by the table and always changing, and where you’re free to set up your own tables with your own topics.
or, more succinctly,
A bustling room filled with tables, where each table is filled with people talking about what they find interesting, a room where you’re free to set up your own tables with your own topics.
Also, I just realized that every time that I edit this post you get notified becase I @ed you. Sorry!
And, finally, happy cake day, @nutomic@lemmy.ml!
I’d love to edit my previous post but I don’t wanna spam you.
As to target audiences, I think it could be helpful to specify the personas that we’re building the sentences for. Does the persona know what the Fediverse is? Do they know what enshittification is? Do they know what open source is? Do they have strong opinions about surveillance capitalism (even if they don’t know the word for it)? Or are they clueless regarding all of these topics?
My suggestion assumes some knowledge of these topics. To be clear, if I’d single out a suggestion of mine, it’d be:
A discussion platform that can’t enshittify. You choose your feed. You choose where to host your account.
Forum for the fediverse
“A forum for the Fediverse” is my preference
Lemmy: Wow that’s a lot of communists
Cool stuff from the web & interesting conversations, no charge, and signing up is easier than you’ve been led to believe.
Too long; Didn’t read: Read last paragraph.
We need to understand the target audience if we want to get a good description. Speaking for myself, I would set the target audience to chronically online people who want to leave corporate walldoms, but I’d also choose a type of communication that focus on the actual service instead of comparing it to other serices. I’d not copy paste description from inspiration source. I’d be willing to reimagine what it is that we are developing.
I’d use communication that is less branded, and more understanding of the soul of the service. Its like saying “orange soda” instead of “fanta”, “search engine” instead of “google” or “car” instead of “Toyota”. The difference is by using this kind of language, we move ourselves away from dependency on the producers towards dependency on the tool.
Understanding the soul also requires that we have a culturally connected understanding of that which we discuss. That is to use less technical communication and more down to earth communication. To not play into sophistication. Less abbreviations, less techno jargon, more plain english, more understanding the equivalents of real life. For example, in the Gemini Protocol of small web, they use the word “capsule” instead of “instance”, which it feel more physical and more real. “Instance” on the other hand makes it sound like a computer thing and not related to reality.
About the soul, we should ask ourselves what the service feels like. Lemmy feels like small townhalls, or like a guy in the street yelling “Guys! What do you think of this drawing.” Perhaps a little gossipy or something like that. Ask yourself, what does lemmy feel like for you? Or what do you want lemmy to feel like? From here I choose “townhall” simply because it works for the purpose.
The above example also gives weight to the idea of physicality. When something feels physical, it feels real, and we feel drawn to it. In contrast, the abstract “instance” makes it more of a curiosity. We can talk of “towns”, “homes” or “hives” instead of “instances”. We can talk of “continents” of loosely connected hives instead of fediverse of platforms of instances. From here I choose “hive” because it distinguishes itself clearly to prevent misunderstandings.
With the physicality and smallness of “hive”, we can also encourage small scale thinking. Because no hives has a million bees. If you see a hive of a million inhabitants, you are going to be drawn towards smaller hives.
I’d also center the attention away from platforms and towards the hives and their interconnectedness. In this way we emphasize the decentralization aspect. The willingness to associate with other hives. I frame this as a hive being “open”.
This means we can talk of fediverse instances as open hives. Mastodon becomes shortletter hives, pixelfed becomes open gallery hive, peertube becomes open video hive.
So to be blunt, I’d suggest open townhall hive.
Lemmy is an open townhall hive that offers public sharing of links, letters and images.
Your own discussion network
… but actually one cannot describe Lemmy’s pitch in one simple sentence, because its main difference is: Reddit but no Spez, fora but connected to each other (and we call this “federation”), and Mastodon but with better topic and content discovery. Any attempt to shorten this will be more or less inaccurate.
So, main Lemmy features, listed under the “Join an instance”, “Apps”, “Explore random instance”, etc., IMHO should look like this:
No ads. No tracking. No meddling.
Posts and comments on your feed are determined only by your settings and users’ votes. All moderation actions are public and viewable using a modlog. We do not block third-party apps. Lemmy is a free software and you can check it for yourself.
(we are practically saying Reddit without Spez)
No single overlord. No isolation
There are dozens of Lemmy websites and you can choose your experience with different vibes, topics, regions and moderation approaches. Yet every instance connects to other ones (forming the Fediverse) and allows you to seamlessly talk with each other, even outside of control of Lemmy creators!
(fora but not siloed. Discussion viewable regardless of where you are logged in)
Know the entire discussion on the topic
All the talk on Lemmy happens on communities. Subscribe to any of them and you will receive complete threads of conversation, regardless where you are signed in. A search, which actually works.* Decentralised, but not fragmented.
(Mastodon but actually not fragmented)
All three “features”/“upsides” of Lemmy are related to each other, somewhat like rock-paper-scissors. All form one pitch of a platform which combines the best features of Reddit, fora and Mastodon solving downsides of these at the same time. It would make sense to display these on the carousel.
*does the search on Lemmy work better than on e.g. Reddit? A “better search than on Mastodon” claim would be plausible, anyway
Since the redditors came? /pol/ but worse. Before the redditors? The golden era of fediposts.
People will not understand anything technical about a website. They will only understand what content readily available.
it’s decentralized reddit. or better yet, a decentralized network of forums.
i usually make the email analogy, where you can use any provider to access the same email network preventing vendor lock-in, but i don’t think that’s very catchy.
“Decentralized network of forums” is probably the best way I’ve heard it described, as an elder millennial who grew up on multiple disparate forums.
The email analogy doesn’t resonate with me because I, as a Gmail user have less than nothing in common with any other Gmail user. On the other hand, the idea of being able to log into my car enthusiast forum and interact seamlessly with people from a video game enthusiast forum is much closer to how I think the ideal Lemmy experience would go.
The decentralized forum for countless communities
Build communities without the middle men.
Communities, free from corporations.
Share and comment in communities, free from corporations
Lemmy has limited federation with Bluesky and Threads. Lemmy itself isn’t being given with a non-commercial license so if any Lemmy instance grows large it’ll likely monetise and become a corporation.
Seize the means of communication /s
I agree that federation is the central feature of Lemmy, besides it being libre software, however the term “federation” is something that already requires a newcomer to open up a search engine at best or get scared by the unknown and leave at worst.
It should exist, but in very layman’s terms, something like:
“A social platform for independent online communities of all topics, owned by people and not corporations, all in one place”
Mastodon also does a pretty good job on their main page, it’s easily understandable by anyone, and scrolling down gives you a much better picture of what it really does if you are interested enough to learn.
social media without the censorship
