I always wondered, why do people follow other users on reddit? What happens if you start to follow someone? Do their posts appear on your frontpage, or something like that? Genuine question
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2021
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Asklemmy
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You see their posts on your front page (on reddit) if they post to their profile as opposed to a community. It's like having your own subreddit as soon as you create an account. Tbh I've never really seen anyone do that but YMMV and I feel if it took off it would start cannibalizing the subreddit "market". Most followers I've had on my account didn't really care for the feature but just did it out of the blue.
Basically the only people I've seen do it are Reddit Admins. Then you've got a couple of subreddit used a bit in this fashion to. Most popular might be r/CGPGrey
maybe you enjoy reading someone's writing on r/writingprompts, maybe you want to get updated from a developer that discuss features on lemmy, maybe theres a horror youtuber that discusses dark mysteries and also mainly on reddit. maybe you want to follow your grandma's reddit account to see what she's up to. or maybe you're just interested what this random anarchist/privacy advocate/conspiracy/hentai/meme/extrimist user is up to. maybe you want to be toxic and follow the people who has the same minority view and help them be toxic, then proceed to get banned afterwards. maybe you want to see what your friend is up to. maybe you want to follow someone's blog, but they don't have a comment section, so they use lemmy/reddit instead for people to discuss.
idk man, who knows, maybe I'm wrong, well I don't even use reddit because they banned me for discussing the fediverse there.
Very deliberate. Why make another mastodon / pleroma / twitter alternative? Those already exist. Lemmy is a federated link aggregator, based around the model of following federated communities / interests, not people, of which there are only a few being developed right now.
so unlike reddit, lemmy's vision is to create purely a link aggregator, not a blog.
well alot would disagree, but I know some cases where you want to follow someone from certain topics;
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for an example in reddit, in r/writingprompts. some would follow someone to enjoy more of their writings.
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maybe a creator links to a blog they have that doesn't have a comment section. the followers would want to follow the creator in this case.
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in mystery related subs, they want to follow a content creator that solves mysteries with users on there. I know that's a big thing on reddit.
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and some people might bring up more interesting topics than others, and when that happens, people tend to follow them. it still can be a topic-focused community.
though if you're making a different thing, that's fine. I'm saying that it might be a good thing for communities to have a follow feature. lemmy still can stay topic-focused.
I also think that platforms that are more intuitive for discussion is far better for microblogging. I liked reddit as a platform for everything, because things are divided in topics/interests/communities. and because of the design of the comments, everyone is engaging with everyone else. not like twitter and mastodon, where people just have comments that have little to no interaction. It's somewhat a miserable place for users to be in.
TL;DR, lemmy has potential to replace reddit altogether, I think once users realize that they can use lemmy for everything they do on reddit. they will definitely come here. because It's a far better alternative for them.
We may add user following far in the future, but it'll be a long time.
But for your use case, I think that popular writers would still post their prompts to [email protected] , and anyone who's subscribed to that community will see them in their feed.
Yes! please consider it, I'll always be waiting for that to happen.
I'll ask the prompt writer's of reddit to also post their WP here, so to contribute.
Because Lemmy is focused on groups, not users. If you want user following, try something like Mastodon or Pleroma. At some point we will implement support for Mastodon or Pleroma users to follow Lemmy users, but its not something that will be supported in Lemmy directly (cause we have way too much work already).
I'll use mastodon to follow lemmy users then in the future. but I hope that following users get added in the future, there is some cases where I want to follow someone.
I appreciate your work by the way, reddit banned me for no valid reason. when I'm done studying coding, I'll definitely contribute to the fediverse.
Is it possible to check the link to my Lemmy profile on Mastodon? If so, where do I paste the rel = "me" attribute on Lemmy? In my bio?
Anyway, you are to be congratulated! Lemmy is a great site to replace Reddit. It has great potential! ;-)
We dont support federation with Mastodon or rel="me" yet, there just so many things to do that are more important.
Thank you :)
Seems kind of useless in the first place. Not sure why reddit ever added it.
I agree. I feel like that was one of the first reddit features that really struck me as odd when it rolled out.
+1
I also would really appreciate a "follow" feature. Mainly to follow the updates from the devs, and a few people on here whose posts are always high quality.