FOSSDLE PieFedwe need more users
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gandalf_der_12tehttps://discuss.tchncs.de/pictrs/image/c6d04591-bea6-4197-80d6-e48aadc47bb3.png
I've been one of the people saying "we don't need more users. we need quality over quantity" and i was wrong.
the way it's going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
Is this strictly Lemmy or does it include related platforms like PieFed and Mbin? Because it seems like there has been some shift to PieFed
they are separate, but not huge
https://piefed.fediverse.observer/stats
https://mbin.fediverse.observer/stats
They are separate but they are federated, they can see lemmy's content and viceversa.
Edit: addition: Their success benefits lemmy, this is the beauty of the fediverse, competition is not really competition, we all win.
I thought this too at first: I expected Piefed to have been the main cause. But, it turns out that Lemmy monthly active users have dropped by around 30k, while Piefed has risen to about 5k
Yeah Piefed is great. It's a night and day difference in experience really
Hot take: the biggest issue is actually ever entering a community and seeing zero comments. Most reddit addiction stems from wanting to read comments, so I think people should add a comment to something if they're upvoting and they see that the thread has zero comments.
Nothing eliminates enthusiasm like seeing 0 comments on every post in a community, especially if that community is driven by bots.
Yep. Engagement drives more engagement.
I think this is it. Posting is reinforced by getting feedback on posts, both up votes and comments
Communities driven by bots should die
oh hey, i'm a comment dude. I rarely think up something worth posting, but i'll chat your fingers off. everyone has a place here.
Doing my part by trying to comment more on posts with 0 comments.
Yeah, same here honestly. Well said, lemmy needs more people here
0-comment posts should be at the bottom of the default feed for this reason. That way new users don't get scared by the awkward silence
Part of the issue (I feel a large part ) is that the learning curve is too steep to get on Lemmy
Now I'm not saying it's hard at all; but it's significantly higher than simply "go to a main page and create a user name and password". Lemmy needs a sign up page that just random signs you up to an active instance (per the instances permission) and automatically subscribes you to the 50 most active instances to just get you started up.
Making a getting started page that's as idiot proof as any .com would probably go a long ways into upping our numbers here.
Random instances are problematic. As others have said you might end up on one of the weird instances. More likely though... you just end up on a dead instance, take one look at the "local" feed and think that's all the content.
I felt I was being pretty specific about "the most popular". If the most popular instance is dead, we got problems.
You said sign up to a random instance and subscribe to 50 most active instances. I assumed the second "instance" was a mistake because you dont subscribe to instances.
The random one can send you to places like hexbear.net (I've tried the randomizer, and I'm not joking it actually truly did pick that very instance for me). Have you ever visited that place? It's like being sent to a leftist MAGA rally. If I was sent there, I'd nope out and never return to the Threadiverse again.
Another place the randomizer can send you is lemmy.ml. Have you seen all the posts calling for outright murder of people living in the Western world? Well, let's just say that a mainstream non-technical normie user who is currently living in a Western world is not likely at all to feel terribly welcomed there.
Hexbear is nothing like a leftist MAGA rally. It's more like a MAGA rally.
i call it the mirror version of conservatives, they talk like right wingers, respond like them, post nonsense like them, and often uses the same BUZZWORDS. they think they are clever buy calling things shitlib, if its not just a shoe-in for libtard, and wokeness.
Just as there are facts and then there are uh... ah... "alternative facts", so too there is an Alt-Right, and they represent basically an Alt-Left.
Or something, I have no fucking clue what is really going on over there. It does seem more like whatever they are, their beliefs are not genuine - as in they even troll themselves so hard that some of them forgot that they were doing it!?!
I've seen the same arguments against liberals here used against Bernie Sanders on Instagram. "Why aren't you doing more about Palestine?", "Why'd you let this happen?", "why are you too powerless to influence policies?". I know some bots follow a script. The only difference here is the framing.
And it worked. So many did not vote for Harris... (tbf the electoral system in the USA is fairly bork3n and complexicated, with the vast majority of votes not actually mattering, especially in blue states that would have voted for her regardless) and looking back, who can say if the campaigns had any effect? Though they did seem to try to have an effect, and that alone should mean... at least something to us? (in terms of actions taken, it seems to have not, but should it have?)
I gotta say, Xi's version is way more effective than Donald's
even the banners and display they use its obviously very "pro-communist"
all yea, new users are more likely to get confused that you can only sign up for 1 account per instace, and not 1-for all like with reddit, so they get fustrated because they couldnt understand why they made a lemmy account on world, and cant login in anorther.
Today is my first day here and I've mostly just been wandering hobby/interest groups!
I think the biggest barrier for new users is that the whole system here is pretty complicated with the "decentralized" model. I don't really understand what it means or how it works, what the difference between the various servers are, or what to join or even which app to download. There are a lot of options and complicated technical terms (like "federated", "fediverse") you need to research just so you can sign up. The fact that you have to write all of these explanations about it doesn't really help. A platform like reddit (which I migrated from) is clean, easy to understand, and makes sense to the casual user.
As for the political stuff, I think people here should engage more with positive content. We should make the wholesome, fun stuff popular because it's appealing. Post about the cool/funny/awesome/interesting stuff you encounter every day; talk about the arts, your hobbies, your funny life fuck ups, your non-serious relationship woes, your pets, etc.! In my exploration today I noticed those kinds of communities barely get any interaction whereas the news/political ones are always active.
This. This is the main complaining I see over the Fediverse when I try to suggest it to people. They enter Lemmy to give it a check and go "It's all politics?"
did you mention that reddit is all politics as well. reddit is intentionally forcing politics to front page, and anypolitics adjacent topics. almost all sports, celebrity talk eventually leads to politics.
According to them, "reddit also shows some soccer and sporting stuff, this is just politics."
Welcome! The thing worth knowing is that corporate social media has intentionally trained you to expect zero friction because that's the basis of their business model - to trap you. Once you spend a bit of time or watch a YT video and understand how lemmy works, it's not that complicated at all.
Consider that things worth doing in life are not so easy that they suck you in. No one gets in shape at the gym on accident. A small bit of effort pays off here.
First of all, welcome! Hope you'll like it here.
Politics surely seems to drown the regular conversations at times. But some niche communities are quite active! Places like !newcommunities@lemmy.world , as well as general search might be of great help in finding your gems.
As per federation and stuff, I think Mastodon of all places does a more or less decent job on boarding new users, and Lemmy has a lot to learn from it.
Regardless, the core idea is that there are plenty of various interconnected physical servers operated by different people. A simple and rough analogy is e-mail, which is actually also federated. You may have your mailbox somewhere like Gmail, and I can have mine in Outlook or even host my own (and you can do that with Lemmy, too). But we'll be able to write to each other like if we use same service.
Here, everything is organized in a way as to allow not only private communication, but public discussion. Posts and comments are public and can be seen by everyone from the server the post is made on.
For example:
* You connect to a server under the lemmy.ca domain. So, some Canadian guy just rents/owns a physical server and puts Lemmy software on it.
* I connect to rekabu.ru, hosted by a guy somewhere in Russia. Same idea.
* The post is in the community on the lemmy.world server, which is a third one.
* Our servers connect to lemmy.world, where the post is made, and exchange information with it. My server sends my comments, your server sends yours, and so we can see each other despite connecting to different places.
* Should I send you a direct message instead, it will go straight from rekabu.ru to lemmy.ca, just like e-mail. And vice versa.
I'll commit to commenting more. I prefer to lurk, but the fediverse needs me 🤣
As someone who's never made a post...
Thanks, WhirlpoolBrewer.
Just talk up Lemmy, the issue is most people doesn't realize there's another option to the popular toxic trash fires.
I've told people about Lemmy before. I got the same reaction everytime.
"It looks like it's just people talking about computers."
And their interest dies. Which tells me there needs to be more diversity of active communities. No one wants to come to a small platform, create a new dead community, and talk to themself.
We need comments, that is the problem. Small communities don't get any positive feedback via engagement, which causes them to die as the owner/sole poster feels like no one cares.
Simply link dumping (effectively what most posts are on content aggregators) is the easy part. Seeing even 1 comment inclines someone to open up the post to read the comment, which makes them in turn likely to reply and it builds from there to a hot/active conversation.
If you can just aim to write that first comment on or two posts a day in more niche communities, it will help achieve growth.
Now this I do and I'm glad it helps
Thank you for your service o7
75% of small communities, if not higher, don't use lemmy-federate to expand the visibility of their community. The user makes the community, broadcasts a few posts locally and then gets sad that no-one replies (because it can only be seen locally). Nor do they make use of !newcommunities@lemmy.world or !communitypromo@lemmy.ca to advertise.
I use lemmy-federate a lot to help this, but it's sometimes too late after they set the comm up.
Good idea, thanks!
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/3757
That's another good point.
PieFed has at least taken some steps to work on this, with it automatically posting new communities to NewCommunities and auto-subbing the instance to those posted there.
If the Lemmy devs stopped pushing ML propaganda, transphobia, and genocide denial and actually worked on the software, we might be in a better place today.
I have proposed piefed instances be able to opt into automatic federation with other selected instances when a community is made. I think it might work like that now via a toggle. Rimu would confirm.
Obviously smaller, personal instances would opt out of that but for general-use instances it makes sense.
Might be "Automatically add new remote communities" toggle on the admin side.
Then again if it's some guy in his corner doing stuff on his own, is it really a community ?
This is my analysis too. And why, instead of just upvoting posts that interest me, I try to think of something to say about them too. The dreaded "0 comments" is never a good look no matter how we much we tell ourselves that it doesn't matter.
For this reason I tend to believe that many communities just have too much primary content. Too many posts and not enough comments.
Thought experiment. 2 communities:
- /c/one has 15 posts per day, 5 of them with 3 comments, the other 10 with none
- /c/two has 3 posts per day with 5 comments each
Which is the healthier community?
My experience is that it's more like this:
Not every post is a hit, so if you cast wide you're likely to get a greater return on comments as something is bound to attract attention. The way the sorting works is that the 5 posts with 3 comments will show at the top and the 0 posts will drop off view, showing an active community.
I'm trying to think of something to say in riposte in order to boost the comment count.
Riposte? What a fun word, I should incorporate that.
This thread is doing well for engagement, go sort by new and comment on something ;)
So saying something without much effort under a post wothout comments actually helps that post to become more populated?
As long as it's relevant, yes.
If you just posted say "I agree" or "Totally this" I don't think that would drive any further engagement.
To be completely honest, Lemmy is kinda dead outside the politics subs and some of the tech ones. When I deleted my reddit account I came here and joined some of the communities I was using reddit for: Pathfinder 2e, RPG, memes, anime. Out of all of them I only see an occasional post from memes while the other ones are literal ghost towns.
Yep.
Even the politics stuff, it seems to lag behind reddit by a half day or so.
sometimes a 1-2 days.
Yeah. I lurk reddit via a redlib instance - so I can browse content but can't log in or of course comment. Often I see some situation unfolding and want to discuss it, but there just isn't any relevant posts on the fediverse.
Shameless plug.
If you are into computer RPGs (CRPGs), we have a relatively active community:
!crpg@lemmy.world
The JRPG community is also pretty active:
!jrpg@lemmy.zip
they should link to each other in the sidebar so people know how to find them
Lemmy communities could benefit from a webring concept.
You're right! That's perfect! that's what i was looking for, now i have a name to it. thank you. i think it would maybe work well enough if the sidebar could link to related communities?
Waiting in my instance to update to Piefed 1.4, I will add World of JRPGs to the sidebar once that happens.
See, the 3 newest posts being 3 over a day old being considered fairly active is one of my issues with Lemmy/fediverse. My whole subscribed feed is like that. Open app, check feed that's not exclusively doom and gloom politics, and nothing has moved since I checked it the day before.
ive seen less movies, entertainment, tv shows posts than before, when ee was still alive.
!movies@piefed.social and !television@piefed.social are still around
It's kind of a chicken and the egg problem though, that happens on any new place, so it's tough to sell them on that unless they already like what's being talked about. I think it's probably better to stick to the fundamentals of the fediverse and what makes it better than a centralized platform. In this phase of Lemmy's popularity we need people that stick around and build communities, and they can only really be enticed to do that based on the merits of the platform.
Agreed. If news headlines and Linux are your jam you're all set already. That's enough to keep me coming back but I aggressively join new communities as they're made to support them. I only post rarely though, do I only do so much as of now
and if someone had a bad experience with Lemmy you can't force them to give it another chance, but you could tell them about PieFed
I just don't have conversations with people in which I proselytize internet aggregators. I just don't talk about this stuff to people.
Besides which, I disagree that the issue is that people don't know. They don't know because they haven't invested the 3 seconds to search "reddit alternatives" and they haven't done that because they're happy wherever they are.
Like "most" users think advertising is "good" because it might remind them about things they want. They think it's "good" that some algorithm might curate content they're more likely to be interested in. They think it's fine that there's a new AI chat bot.
Having an awareness that alternatives exist does not solve these fundamental impediments.
They know there are other options, but they won't join us on the fediverse. That's because no celebrities or influencers have moved to the fediverse.
And as for reddit users, most of them just like "huh? I like staying here" or "the lemmy devs are tankies and lemmy is a toxic tankies dumpster"
But that's okay with me, at least we have fewer toxic people.
Well there's always PieFed
George Takei
Many people improperly exchange "Threadiverse" or even just "Lemmy" with "Fediverse". George Takei is on Mastodon / the Fediverse, but not on the Threadiverse / Lemmy / PieFed / Mbin.
But thats the same with everything, Mastodon and X as well.
Hell, even Governments like mine here in Australia use that shitty platdorm. Why there is no gov.au Mastodon server I don't know.
i actually did this like 2 days ago and the guy agreed to at least try it out. people just need to talk about it and be honest about what is good/bad about the current state
Yeah. They could move to an unpopular toxic trash fire.
i occasionally mention lemmy, on a forum where people got banned from reddit( for people earning money from using massive accounts on reddit)
It’s quality and quantity. The quality has held despite a drop in users. Just wait and let Reddit have another controversy and we’ll get another infusion of converts. Popularity may only threaten more bots and scams.
You know, there was a great blog recently that wrote about this, that now is the perfect time to popularize the fediverse. That's because as tensions with the US are rising, more people in europe are looking for alternative internet platforms to communicate over. So the fediverse can jump in here and offer itself as an alternative.
It's not just Europe. Plenty of us in the United States looking to circumvent the vanguard party. And fascism is rising globally. We need decentralization and federation to survive going forward.
This.
We're actually seeing a rise in new user applications over at Feddit.dk. The hostile behavior of the US has gotten some Reddit users to seek alternatives to american platforms.
i suspect reddit has upped thier bannings recently, even banning anti-right wing views. plus they upped thier detection of people who are serial evaders, the ones that use hundreds of accounts to spam(not the propaganda bots though). reddit bans for refrencing physical "damage" to people, not even outright saying it. or implying a "demographic" or anti-zionist comments.
must be the "greenland invasion, distraction by trump thing recently"
When I look at some generic instance's unfiltered feed all I see is posts about USA/Trump. I can see how this might deter a lot of Europeans who are looking for alternatives to Reddit.
Piefed sign up process asks the new user if they want to mute Trump and Musk. That helps a bit.
Yeah I’m ngl the All feed kinda sucks.
I don’t think people shouldn’t be talking about the horrors in the US but if “all” is just 5 LW posts in a row on US politics its not exactly enticing for a new user.
This is my experience too; I haven't really noticed a change. I still see about the same number of conversations and the same depth of conversation as I always have here. I was very surprised that the change in user count was so high.
I wonder if there's a committed/stable subsection of the userbase, that is mainly responsible for posts and comments, and has largely stuck around throughout? And then most of the swings in user count are from people who were less active to begin with?
its also the fact that we can ban whole communities too, from popping up your feed. since there are less users, blocking the users that are obviously tankies or conservatives, reduces us seeing more posts.
I like it here
this is how something like Digg swoops in and steals all the users
Or Bluesky / Threads vs Mastodon
Digg? Now with AI? That Digg? You mean the Digg that lost all its users to Reddit in the first place? Not happening.
... Maybe SomethingAwful will somehow make a comback rofl.
I feel like I'm going mental over here because this has not been my experience. The quality has always been spotty, but the last few months I've noticed more and more posts linking to awful "news" rags or no source at all. Worse, I rarely see people questioning the lack of quality information, simply gobbling it up because it aligns with their world view. Plus 70% of the comments on this platform could be generated by a classic r/subredditsimulator style bot and nothing would change; the same 5 points about AI, capitalism, and Linux are made in every thread in the exact same style every day.
And yes I'm mostly talking about news communities because Linux comms are usually fine but repetitive and while I'd love to interact with non-news content there just... isn't much being made.
It is. It's one of the reasons i've pivot back to reddit these last few months.
More then Reddit this place is an echo chamber for the far left anti capitalist crowd. While I don't mind a discussion, everything over simplified to EAT THE RICH was getting tiresome.
No company or institution is here. If I have a problem with my [insert device or appliance here] chances are good someone on reddit will reply and 50/50 there is a useable answer somewhere. Here it just stays silent. Or you get the anti capitalist reply that everything is fucked and we should just eat the rich.
There are no real gaming or device or brand communities. Want to ask something about modding game x? Not here. Want to hook up with other players of game y? Not here. Want to know how to fix your [household appliance here]? Not here..Have a problem with mainboard from brand z? Not here.
When you ask something here about Linux or any other gpl software the answer often times boils down to RTFMI! (I= idiot) That also happens on reddit to be honest. But here it's just more extreme. And I know I'm an idiot. That's why I asked. I'm too stupid can someone please explain.
Where the fuck is LJDawson. Sync is dead it seems.
And yes. Reddit more and more feels like an AI test site. For example the AITA posts are getting more and more out of this world. They are unbelievable, that's just for clicks.
So the enshittification is not slowly but very fast becoming a problem and within a few months it will be another youtube, unusable. But for now... It's the best we have.
Some relatively active (in terms of posts, breadth of content and user engagement) gaming communities across Lemmy/Threadi:
I moderate/curate like 6 of them, so I am biased, but we do have a solid selection of gaming communities beyond !games@lemmy.world or !pcgaming@lemmy.ca.
Gaming communities exist, based on genres usually. I've used !citybuilders@sh.itjust.works for questions about city building games. !soulslike@lemmy.zip is also there.
What's this AITA sub you speak of?
It's called r/AmateurStoryWriters ffs, get the name right
That must be so difficult for you compared to all the wonderful corporate platforms full of rightwing hateful trolls who genuinely harass people.
I'm going to tentatively upvote this. There's a good reason the left wingers on this platform sound bitter (myself included). The Overton Window has shifted right, so they're pretty much surrounded by toxic right-wing stuff on every other platform.
Still, it doesn't help Lemmy attract moderates.
What conservatives want is for us to treat them like babies with tiny little fragile baby beliefs that we have to coddle.
I don't care if you think differently than me, what I care about is babies demanding we take their hateful and irrational ideologies seriously while they simultaneously target vulnerable groups with at a minimum hate speech and harassment.
If we coddle conservatives this place becomes less welcoming to new people, that is how it is.
Yeah you're absolutely right. Though we are talking about two separate things here; OP and I are talking about "eat the rich" left rhetoric. Like people coming here and seeing comments like, "wheel out the guillotines", and "kill all CEOs".
You're talking about the fact that we shouldn't welcome conservative voices after they've ruined the rest of the internet. I absolutely 100% completely agree with you.
I'll give you an example; I'm more leftie than my wife. So it surprising to her when I said that people should be allowed to just punch Nazis with no legal ramifications. Like to her it was actually confronting to hear someone she knew advocate for violence. I explained my reasoning. They are corrosive to society's norms, and really need a different set of rules to regular people to be contained. The only language they understand is violence.
But the point is the average person is going to be immediately repulsed by calls for violence and extreme rhetoric, regardless of whether it is morally justified and the reasoning is technically correct.
So imagine a moderate "regular" person coming to this forum. Without the context of history that you and I have, how do they interpret these comments? Will they want to stay on Lemmy?
I'm not saying Lemmy should change, by the way. I have no problem with the rhetoric, and there's a case to be made that getting rid of it may make it easier for conservatives to get a foothold here. But it's worth a discussion, I guess.
And that all said, there's a chance that by "eat the rich" OP means anything complaining about the rich, in which case they can fuck off to their own instance.
the sudden rise in 2025 early on, was the massive purges reddit was doing, banning almost anyone left and right, and hitting all thier accounts at once. when they usually never try to multi-ban you before. they did take thier foot of the pedal though, because they realized they were banning too much, lowering thier faux engagements with bots. reddit switched to more insidious bannings in the background.
…I am drifting away from Lemmy myself.
Political communities are echo chambers like Reddit, in a different color. Discussing tech or helping others is better, but still feels like talking in circles.
Wholesome subs like /c/SuperBowl are sublime, but I mostly lurk there.
Information hygiene is awful. Big subs upvote tabloids and Tweets to the sky, as long as they align with their beliefs. I just saw a discussion on a not-obviously AI generated photo with the community sentiment of “misinformation? Who cares. It’s a pro-lefty meme, so spread it.”
Anyway, all this scrolling and impulse commenting eats time. I get the same feeling of shouting into a black hole that I get on corporate social media.
Much of this is my fault, though.
I have several niches I intend to make original posts for, but never do.
It’s somewhere in the giant pile of my IRL executive dysfunction :’(
I get bummed that the political stuff has really taken over. I find myself spending more and more time just working on my own content and answering people's comments than browsing the other communities. It's draining scrolling past so much stuff to find the fun bits, but I don't want to just block it and not see how our platform is developing as a whole.
A lot of communities have rules that posts need to be titled the same as the source article, which, while it prevents editorializing, it also brings all those ragebait headlines here. Plus I'd like to see Lemmy users' opinions moreso than an article I could just read myself. I'd probably prefer more of the political post to be thoughts/feelings and then discussion is backed up by decent articles rather than an article being the post and comments are just all steered back to a single, often inflammatory article.
If half our content is just reposted mainstream media, why would one expect our comment sections to look any different than the comment sections of those mainstream sites?
I agree with the sentiment but disagree with the prognosis.
In my experience, the ragebait articles around here are largely from the same sites. Rawstory, mediaite, dailybeast, some of The Guardian's more indulgent pieces. I won't presume to know why the posters post them, but they're ragebait to start.
I don't even see "Big Media" like Reuters or local news or whatever get upvoted much. And as longs as the news sections aren't mixed up with the opinion ones, IMO they're more professional.
The accurate title rule is great as long as posters pick more journalistic articles instead of opinion pieces or reposts. And if they don't there's no fixing that anyway.
And I straight up I disagree with this.
There are tons of talking heads with opinions. But journalism rooted in sourcing is much harder. That should come first, or at least come with an opinion in the OP, and then the discussion can be built around facts.
Yeah I'm turned off from interacting. I got banned (I'm guessing since I can't even reply to people) from world news when Maduro was kidnapped and I mentioned that my Venezuelan friends were hopeful. As this was scary but good news. And my god how I got flamed. Theres no room for conversation I got tagged, replied to, people made fun of me and that's it. I wasn't even allowed to interact anymore so it looks like I just said something and ran away.
I'm not even close to center, yet it's all or nothing with politics here. It's seriously become reddit 2.0. Pathetic.
Yeah. The .world news community mods don’t seem to care about clickbait, misinformation, calls for violence or doxxing or rape, as long as they’re the “correct” politics. Calling for Ivanka Trump to get shot? Serious deepfake meme? Perfectly acceptable, apparently, in spite of the admins’ pushback.
But make a comment like yours, and the moderation is… that.
I haven’t even blocked the tankie communities or anything, but I had to block /c/politics, as they’re so active they pollute my feed.
I’m fine with leaving that part of Lemmy permanently blocked though.
kinda odd you dint block the tankies, they are just as problematic if not more so. thats why i had them blocked. i had to block politics because the people are subtly promoting pro-zionist content.
I like Lemmy as a “zoo”
I like seeing nuts and weirdos and niches and stuff when I scroll by. It feels like the old internet. And I also find that lemmy.ml has good discussions outside tankie politics, so I don’t want to block that out.
Problem with the main political subs is that they’re so big they flood post sorted by Active, Rising, or New Comments. Their tabloid garbage crowds everything else out.
I don't mind other opinions. I don't mind different points of view. I don't mind culture and mentality differences. I'm Ukrainian living in America so the views I have, while leaning heavily left, differ to the point of leftists vehemently opposing even the slightest push back to some policies or views.
For this reason I never delete my comments and never block anyone. I need to see more. I need to see the different people and cultures. Otherwise we set up a community like parts of Seattle (where I live) that is in this political bubble that get shocked when anyone has views that differ. It creates this perspective that these other people don't exist and that the world was stolen from them. And the reason they can't comprehend other views is because they're involved in communities where these views get erased.
Yeah, this is generally my philosophy. I have exactly 1 user blocked, as well as a pure bot community or two.
But the problem for me is magnitude. With its sheer number of upvotes, /c/politics is blotting out my sun, reducing diversity; it does no good leaving it in my feed.
I really admire this, and wish I was more like this. I had conservative parents and grew up in a conservative echo chamber. I got their opinions shoved down my throat my entire life. I have exactly 0 patience for conservative most view points. Especially when there it conflicts with scientific evidence and/or common decency. I tend to shut down conversations (online and in real life) with people that disagree with me.
Reality is it just hurts me to see their opinions being the dominant/default position in society. Makes our society feel unforgiving.
But I'm trying to change. I'm meditating, and journaling on this.
The info hygiene here is really bad. I thought people here would be better about finding well sourced informative articles to talk about but its the same news slop that dominates other platforms. This is a discussion forum so posts should have something worth discussing. Spamming the same trump action over and over doesnt create any discussion.
Scrolling through the news community is so depressing there is no comments because everyone is thinking "what do you want me to say its bad its awful"
On the contrary, I've made a few (not a ton) of what I thought were interesting news posts, but they don't seem to gain traction.
I think the deeper issue is ragebait works, very well. The community seems to be content with that, and Lemmy/Piefed devs aren't structuring the site the counter it.
I guess ragebait really is what the people want. Its a bit sad but oh well.
thats how reddit works, up until p45, there was very little rage bait, after he was elected russia started pushing it heavily on reddit, and thats where we are now with reddit.
It’s addictive. It’s not like I haven’t steeped in it either.
This is what I keep hammering; people can’t help themselves, especially under stress. Perverse engagement incentives need to be fixed structurally to give us a fighting chance, otherwise Lemmy/Piefed will end up like Voat and all the other Reddit clones.
I don't like how broad Lemmy assumes default interests are, though then again showing everyone the average interests may statistically be the best initialization point.
Every time I'm shown a community I'm totally uninterested I make sure to go in and block it from my feed. Likewise with aggressive or otherwise pathological users. It gets better.
Lemmy doesn’t assume anything. Sorting is done by votes or activity from all communities; the intent is for the user to subscribe to communities to curate their feed. But blocking works too.
I don’t know precisely how Reddit works now, but it used to be like that as well. There was no interest algorithm, no suggestions, other than a bit of vote count nonlinearity. It just had the quirk of defaulting to a few select subs in “hot,” instead of “all” like most Lemmy/Piefed instances do.
the only way to not have an echo chamber where people vote with their emotions is to have an enlightened gnosticism user-base which is obviously very difficult to get and nurture but i'm trying :)
the best way to do this is to cultivate an atmosphere of discussion and in-depth thought regularly, which you can do by engaging with these discussions and seeking enlightenment yourself.
why beat yourself up. you know good content won't be rewarded or seen.
only the ragebait. the internet is not information driven anymore, it's dopmine driven.
it's the super highway of rage and hate.
Dopamine? It's cortisol driven.
I have some posts/interests that I think would get some visibility. In my case, it really is executive dysfunction, heh.
Not that you're wrong. And, unfortunately, its a ludicrously profitable highway outside of the Fediverse.
i've seen a huge uptick in the rage/hate activity on lemmy... and it drives tons of upvotes and comments.
smart thoughtful interesting stuff... gets maybe 1/10 the activity.
This is it. People are leaving because there are problems and not enough resources to fix them. Because that's dEcEnTtAlZaTioN.
Yeah. We have monkey brains, and overcoming intertia is hard.
I think the site could be better structured to address this, specifically by organizing communities into a “taxonomy,” so posts from niche interest automatically filter up into bigger subs. Thus, participation would feel easier/more enaging, and folks would have more focused and active niches to participate in.
Making that suggestion on the Lemmy/Piefed repos is on my messy todo list.
I have been noticing a drop in post/comments diversity and quantity. The diminishing users is something noticeable and sad.
We're in times where we need to seek alternatives to big tech more than ever, and yet, people don't seem to care :(
and here I thought it was because I've blocked close to 300 users.
same, i blocked almost as much. condescending even from non- tankies will be blocked, or smartass.comments. probably those people posts the most, since the most chronically online are the controversial users/posters.
We have to earn it if we want it. Oftentimes someone will mention some event or trend or something that happened and being only on the Threadiverse, not also Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or X or Bluesky or even Reddit I have no idea what they are talking about - it's not good to be too isolated.
So... bring on the downvoting I suppose, because I started checking some of those places, including Reddit. Not like daily but not never either. That's where the content is, so where else can I go to get at that?
It is so easy to say that "something should happen". It's much harder to MAKE that thing actually happen.
Maybe I should admit defeat and go back to reddit.. Perhaps everyone is supposed to be slaves to the shareholders
It is your choice, but if you stay you could put in some real EFFORT to make things better. e.g. people keep saying how difficult it is to make an account - and as a result now https://piefed.social/auth/instance_chooser exists. There is no hexbear or lemmy.ml on there, but even if theoretically there was one day, there's specifically an option for "Good for newbies": Newbie-friendly vs. choose your own adventure, to accommodate both desires, effectively making such controversial places as opt-in rather than having to opt-out, which requires first understanding and awareness of the details and ramifications of the decision.
Another problem is community discovery: yes entire communities are dedicated to helping with out, but how does one find out about those communities in the first place? They are not mentioned in any instance side-bar that I have seen, and rather most side-bar links to places are to expired or dead communities, e.g. Discuss.Online points to !new_here@discuss.online with 3-year-old pinned posts and the most recent post was 1 year ago, plus only one more from all of 2025. But in contrast, PieFed has a new user sign-up wizard that asks the user questions and subscribes them to communities based on their interests - memes, news, whatever - plus long after that aids greatly in community discovery, e.g. with Topics, Feeds (user-shareable and customizable), and combining comments across all cross-posts.
PieFed gives me hope for the Threadiverse.
In the meantime though, if you need something specific, then yeah you have to go to wherever it is located at. I haven't posted or even commented on Reddit, and made probably <5 votes in all of 2025, all to help promote either PieFed or Lemmy, but I do read it occasionally because that is the only place I know of where the discussions that I was looking for were taking place (other than Facebook or Xhitter that are 1000x worse). Call this defeat if you will, I call it strategic assessment of the current situation, even as we strongly push forward to make this a better place, i.e. realism.
me too i noticed, the problem was when lemmy.ee went down and all the users scattered to other instances, or the piefed but would not engage any post on lemmy. i saw massive reduction in posts like movies, entertainment tv shows,,etc. also the tankies i blocked, or the problematic accounts are likely posting themselves. i dont even come on during daytime, only a 1-3 hrs before sleep at night, because i know there will be less content overall, its probably healthier for people anyways. people are still addicted to reddit unfortunately.
The addiction thing is so true. Bug tech invest a lot into making their user experience as addictive as possible. The mainstream social networks are highly optimized attention catchers create for making people spend as much time as possible in them, and the fediverse can't provide with that addiction, so the more people are addicted to social media, the worse their experience around here will be.
Well yes, lemm.ee hosted the movies and television communities. You know movies and television reformed over on piefed.social? The content you're referring to didn't disappear. You can still access it.
Have you checked !movies@piefed.social and !television@piefed.social
it's not just not caring. lemmy is currently not a viable alternative for e.g. reddit (there are no active conmunities for any of mine hobbies and posting to any of those that are here doesn't make sense - there is nobody out here who could respond to a specific question about analog photography or something similar). fediverse as a whole will never reach the momentum of old centralized social media - by design. it turns out that having many small servers with different moderation policies is great for resilience but sucks for bringing people together. i found out recently that my mastodon server is blacklisted on many of mainstream ones not because there is some bad content there but because it federates with some servers that mods somewhere else consider harmful... and so i am missing large swats of content from those.
I've seen very niche questions answered on all kinds of topics. If there's no active community for your hobby, just ask on a general Ask community
i find out alot of people i blocked are the likely posters, yea thats probably why im seeing less and less posts now.
I'm not talking about people I block (I am not exposed enough and don't suffer enough harassment so I don't block almost anyone)... I'm talking about about mods of the instancr that hosts people I care about suddenly blocking instance that hosts my account - not because anything we did but because they didn't like that mods of my instance didn't block another instance that has some weird (e.g. transfobic) content. I follow a friend and suddenly we are out of contact because some entirely unrelated drama. And that's how fediverse works by design.
Ah yes, cancel culture. The Left always eats its own (and btw the Right does the same, eventually, but usually waits to win against the Left first).
Edit: moral purity beatings will continue until morale improves.
Genuinely, why would they do that? Like does Mastodon software work differently than Lemmy's - is there some way that someone from one of THOSE places could post content onto your instance (I dunno, CSAM? or just some trolling or piracy or something that someone considers offensive), and thereby it could come in indirectly to theirs? It makes no sense to me, at least if we were talking Lemmy, but I am interested how Mastodon differs there.
it's activitypub thing so lemmy as well. you sign up on one server, subscribe to community on different server, mods of the different server will decide they don't like your server for any reason (e.g. explicitly because mods of your server didn't blacklist some other server) and you are out of that community. it sucks. imho something based on the old news system would be better (i.e. community exists independently and servers just subscribe to them or not).
Yeah, i feel the same, for a lot of reasons i've noticed around here
a lot of niche subs usually were created turing the apicalipse 3 years ago, but were quickly deserted, so anyone curious about thoses interests right now on lemmy would just find old communities where no one has spoken for years, and get back to reddit out of boredom.
the few staying for the mainstream communities where there is still some activity are continuously hit by the same topics (lemmy is small and divided enough nowadays to act like echochambers unfortunately) and either participate, or feel excluded and leave.
Echochambers, stereotypes, and hatred contribute to make lemmy more small and divided.
The cycle continue, and that's how you kill a defederated service.
Honestly, i see more people arguing about communities or users from lemmy itself than people simply debating or talking about things from their interests. That makes me a bit sad.
It's not that we're missing more user, but rather that we are missing communities where people would come for the community specifically.
Lemmy is filled with people that want something that is reddit without being reddit.
We will start winning the moment we have communities were people join Lemmy to be part of said community.
That's why i run the !mars@discuss.tchncs.de community. It's a very niche interest topic but i found no other good-quality community discussing martian settlement so i made my own. And i figure if the quality is good enough, it might be enough to bring in other users from other platforms simply to have good discussions.
I have checked the mars subreddit on Reddit but it's full of idiots and people who are just generic naysayers or people who saw 1 youtube video and now think they're experts or sth.
The problem is that many specific communities are transitioning from reddit to discord. It would be cool to have some kind of matrix integration with Lemmy accounts/communities and vice versa.
I have been using "social software" for decades now. In the early 90s I ran a single line BBS networked across Canada and USA (every modem in the network called the nearest modem and we shared posts this way). I went to friendster (before that "makeoutclub", if anyone remembers that thing), myspace, then piled onto facebook like everyone else.
The only thing that seems to make a social media tool relevant is when a critical mass of young people, in that 15-30 demo, decides that it's time to adopt a new social media platform. This has been because they want a place away from their families, but there's also all kinds of memetic reasons behind it that have nothing to do with function.
Young people need to flood to open source, distributed networks like Lemmy. I don't mean to be a token old guy and speak poorly of an entire generation, but I'm not impressed with the embracing of Tiktok, Facebook and reddit. I find it hard to take anyone with a cause who inhabits these spaces seriously. I told my niece about why Facebook sucks, and she said "that's so boomer." Like, wtf?
So yeah. Young people, stop using twitter and all that junk. I promise if you come here I'll go somewhere else.
Lemmy feels like a return to the old internet, when communities were smaller, and for me its refreshing to be able to participate in communities on major topics again without getting drowned out. It harkens back to the days of early forums and message boards, where users gathered around shared interests and discussions felt more organic.
I agree with you but I would still want numbers to go up a little bit, not down the way they are apparently.
Couldn't say it any better. If stagnant popularity is what is necessary to stay unattractive for botnets and bad actors I personally am all for it.
But we aren't "stagnant", we are decreasing.
I'd say monthly active looks pretty much stagnant. Of course we would all benefit from greater adoption.
For me it was spezgate that brought me to abandon reddit. Yes, a platform is only as valuable as its userbase. Someone else here boiled it down to "quality over quantity". I don't expect this to be the final verdict on the trend.
To me this is a lot like Linux vs Windows market share. Microsoft are currently doing everything in their power to enshittify Windows 11. But the endgame for a community first product like Linux isn't to promote itself better towards potential switchers. People need to make that switch themselves.
The big tech product will probably always "win" in terms of adoption, even if it is inferior in terms of its own merits. At the end of the day nobody wants to be Microsoft (reddit) in this analogy. And Apple (bsky) isn't that much better.
Hard agree there - growth at any costs should not be our motto, just improvement in terms of features for our own sakes, and if people enjoy that and want to join us, then that's wonderful as well.
Though at one point we had 55k active users, and now we "only" have ~35k, so it seems like it has gone down over the years. Though to be fair, then it cycled back upwards, then downwards, then upwards again, then downwards - and yet always decreasing from that peak of 55k to where we are now, an overall negative trend. Even just six months ago we had 41k, a loss of ~15% now compared ot then (correspondingly, PieFed only has ~2k users total across all instances, so this loss of 6k for Lemmy was nowhere near balanced by a corresponding increase in PieFed as would be explained by a migration effect).
But even if you are fully right, and this all reflects relative stagnation, that's still not a good thing imho, given the waves of Reddit migrants that we've seen coming here during the same time-period. It means that in roughly equal numbers to new people joining we are also losing a LOT of people, to parts unknown (perhaps they went back to Reddit, as many claim to have done in r/RedditAlternatives, or perhaps they moved instead to BlueSky?).
I think that every platform will reach sort of an equilibrium during its lifetime. That relative "plateau" may last for months, years or even longer than that, but I think it will always be reached after its peak.
imho the height of that peak and plateau speak to the overall popularity potential of the platform. Which is just that. A potential to attract masses. Whether maximizing this is a core goal is a different question.
The peak for Lemmy at 55k is really really super tiny, in comparison to Reddit's literal millions. Whether that's a good or bad thing is up for debate, e.g. this very OP stating it as a bad thing, and people responding to it pushing back saying it is a good one, to have avoided being noticed more by bot brigades and large-scale disinformation and influence campaigns (which might be here as well, but there's definitely less incentive for them to be).
The potential to attract large masses here I think does not exist. It could though, in theory, if we really did want it to and work towards it. The major thrust forward there that I know of is the PieFed software, which gets out from underneath many of the heavy aspersions that Lemmy is not even trying to distance itself from regarding authoritarianism. But PieFed is only used by a couple thousand people, and high ironically people are resistant to switch to it, just like others are resistant to switching from Reddit. It seems like it is human nature to remain in a place long after there become increasingly fewer reasons to do so.
I enjoy that aspect for sure. Once I had subscribed to enough communities, I have plenty of content and apparent activity in my feed. For a lot of people that takes getting used to and people have low attention spans.
Just wait for Reddit to finally ban porn and we’ll have more users than we know what to do with
Oh they won't ban it they'll hide 18+ subs behind a pay wall and call it "premium access"
Not to get too political but Redgifs is banned in my state without Id verification. I would guess it’s coming if the fundamentalists continue to get their symbolic wins from the unrepentant rapist pedophiles thieves and drunks running th joint.
I feel like that's effectively the same thing.
you know what? that might be it!
Lemmynsfw coming in clutch
I thought lemmynsfw hid their content for unregistered users as well so not really
This is getting too analytical for what was intended as a joke
For science
🍻
But do we want whatever users are still on Reddit? If they all come here, we will have to find a different place
I've been using Lemmy less because it's so depressing. It feels like a majority of the engagement is with depressing US politics and a strong left bias (to be clear, I also hate the current government). Unlike most, I really like most of the nerdy tech content.
Which is why I've been lurking more on Hacker News lately, it's tech minded forums with an appropriate level of politics and more nuanced takes. And as a bonus the interface even less bloated (in terms of resource usage) than any Lemmy frontend I've tried.
Hacker News is currently drowning in "I did something with AI" posts.
I really can't with Hacker News. The new US food guidelines were a good example. Every single damn comment was defending the inclusion of beef and dairy in it, especially saturated fat.
So many disgusting pro-AI comments strawmanning anti-AI opinions too.
Don't forget you can block communities that irritate you. I've got plenty blocked that aren't even things I'm opposed to, but just don't want my feed to be full of.
Yes, but you don't want to lock yourself in an echo chamber either. You want to be as close to reality as possible, at least I do. Though I realize that a niche federated internet community is a bad place for that. But this is the reason I don't block communities. I used to be on lemm.ee for that reason, but it got shut down. I have no problem reading communist propaganda and deciding for myself if it's garbage. But I have problem with censorship. Though bullying and abuse is where I draw the line. But what I see is even without algorithm based feeds, people are still polarized. Possibly because, like me, people with moderate views tend to not comment or engage, while polar opposite groups want you to firmly choose sides and denounce the other side or else you are garbage. In summary, I think it's depressing because reality is currently depressing. But it's unrealistic to just pretend everything is just fine and be happy.
I've done that and it's significantly better because of that feature. Speaking of, is it possible to migrate blocklists from one account to another?
i use it less, because theres been less content, ever since ee shut down, the users just scattered too much to agregate more posts, this is not including politics.
Some Lemmy apps (and probably frontends, too) have filter settings allowing you to remove any mentions of various political figures to focus on what matters.
But yeah, Lemmy and most of Fediverse really need the influx of regular folks and regular topics.
“Strong left bias” is not bias, it is just a reflection of normal human decency. If you mean that fake leftists like the dbzero fascists are around a lot, I would agree and it’s a problem.
Since when are dbzero users racists?
Fascists. Authoritarians. Whatever you want to call them. I’ll explain. They submitted a proposal to ban all “Zionists or Zionist apologists” and I objected on the grounds that it is, objectively, the very fascism they were denouncing. They banned me simply for suggesting this. That’s what I’m talking about.
Banning fascism isn't fascism though. This doesn't make any sense.
Banning ideas and opinions is not banning fascism. But let’s start over. First, they banned me. All I did was say that banning people for having the opinion “Israel should exist as an entity” is authoritarian. I wasn’t even defending Israel, which, like I said, people should be allowed to do as part of normal freedom of speech.
Second, I didn’t even say anything extreme, like “you should be hanged for treason!” or some such nonsense. I said “you have the right to ban people for whatever you want since it’s your instance, but I think that’s fascist if you do so.” And they banned me. Do you think that’s even remotely normal behavior?
Banning people for their behavior and conduct is perfectly reasonable. Also, if some Israel defender comes in and says “I don’t care how many children need to be killed, it’s worth it,” then I think you have every right to ban them. Advocating murder is crazy shit. But simply saying “Israel has a right to exist” or something similar as being ban worthy? That’s absolute ghoulish authoritarianism. There’s no such thing as “banning fascism” because this is just a discussion forum.
Imagine being so biased that you are completely blind to the facts.
Since you do not understand even the smallest aspect of what I said, you are not in a position to make such a judgment.
As a developer for a Lemmy app, recently I've felt Lemmy become more and more fragmented resulting in a poorer than usual user experience. And the base user experience is already poor. I'm mostly just venting but man is the fragmentation annoying to deal with as a developer and as a user. :/
Let's stop working on "Lemmy app" , "mbin app", "PieFed app", "Mastodon app" and just embrace ActivityPub as the single API.
phone apps can't use activity pub as that's a server protocol so if you want a good mobile interface you generally speaking need a rest-y api that an application can query. yes, lemmy and piefed both feature PWA frontends that can be installed to your homescreen, however on older phones this can be an extremely suboptimal experience as PWAs tend to require more RAM than native apps.
You don't need to get rid of the server. All I'm saying is that we can have a server that uses the ActivityPub API directly instead of these ad-hoc APIs for each different use case.
i don't understand how that negates the utility of a mobile app that presents this information. also i'm not saying to get rid of the server-client paradigm, not sure what you're talking about
I am saying is that we can have a mobile app that can do anything that Lemmy does, but without requiring a "Lemmy API" to do it.
Any "Lemmy client" could in theory read and create posts/comments/votes/moderation reports directly by interacting with the actors outboxes. The same for any "Mastodon" client, or any "PeerTube client".
I think that would just increase the fragmentation LOL. It's like that XKCD comic
It's the complete opposite of that.
"Use ActivityPub directly for interacting with the social web graph" is the same as saying "Use HTTP and HTML directly to interact with the world wide web".
The reason we don't see different websites using different versions of HTTP, or that someone can open a HTML document on pretty much website and read its contents is because we are building the application on top of the protocol layer.
But ActivityPud is very barebones so you will need to implement a lot of features. In doing so you are effectively creating a new Lemmy.
Indeed, I am. But to be perfectly honest, I'm doing a lot less work that I original thought in the server side, and when I get to start working on Mastodon compatibility, I will probably just change the internal implementation of mastodon's js sdk.
Right but you understand how this makes fragmentation worse right?
There is a difference between Mastodon and Lemmy because Mastodon is user-centric and Lemmy is content-centric. I wrote about this here
My point is that you can have a "content-centric" application separate from the "user-centric" application, but they are just different ways to represent and interact with the data in the social graph and as such they don't need separate APIs.
yeah, i think embedding Lemmy content into Mastodon is trivial, because you just show the post. But the other way around, embedding Mastodon posts into Lemmy could be a bit more tricky, because in what community do you show the post? There could be a virtual community for each Mastodon server, like when you post something on mastodon.de, then it's displayed on the lemmy community /c/all@mastodon.de
What do you think of this?
In ActivityPub terms, there is no such thing as a "Mastodon posts" or "Lemmy communities". You just have "authors" and "audiences". In effect, it would mean that you emulate a "post to a community" by writting a post with the community as the "audience", and anyone that follows the actor that represents the group (equivalent to the Lemmy Community) would find the posts.
so you are saying that each author should represent their own community that they populate with posts each time they post something
Okay but conversely: Lemmy was always going to die off. I've been shouting this for years and recently stopped because it was just too annoying to people. Note, it's not truly going to "die off" in the same way that Reddit was never going to "die off" either - just get more enshittified and less popular and less worth visiting.
So this was never going to not happen. At least with the creation of PieFed, the Threadiverse has a chance to succeed?
That's just my two cents anyway:-P.
While (I think) I totally understand what you are saying here...
... Yeah I'm honestly fine with lemmy just being more or less a tiny cluster of neo forums.
I like the cozy.
At the same time... from I guess a less selfish perspective... yeah, this is the exact time an alternative to Reddit and other corpo social media needs to be popularized.
But, somewhat alleviating myself from that... I don't really know anybody that I could 'word of mouth' spread lemmy to, that I haven't already.
And I'm too crippled to put stickers on really anything outside my own apartment, lol.
I'm here, I just never comment :3
This part is important too! Fediverse is remarkably active for its user count, and that's its strength!
Join us as we make this place lively - and lovely :)
Me too!
I’ve been trying to comment more, but we have to post as well
After trying to convert a friend who heavily uses reddit, multiple times, I recommended him again the other day to leave the hellsite (reddit).
I didn't recommend Lemmy but have a while back.
He himself specifically brought up that he 'didn't vibe with Lemmy as much as reddit' and that he believes he would 'miss stories he would otherwise have liked to see' by switching to Lemmy.
The other main pain point I've encountered is the small and niche community problem, which I'm sure we are all aware of - certain information feels like it can only be found on such small subreddits.
Therefore I have two suggestions:
- create a Lemmy instance that mirrors reddit, rather than have bots post reddit posts onto main Lemmy instances, create an instance that mirrors specific subreddits on request, including the comments of their posts, and allows Lemmy users to comment and reply back, where those comments are also propagated to reddit so that replies and discussion are mirrored also.
This would struggle due to reddit API and compute power requirements but the subreddits on request and a specific instance for these posts would eliminate the bot spam problem from earlier attempts at the same thing.
The other suggestion would be:
- set up trackers for major (and newly popular) subreddits, tag posts by priority, and use this set of posts to determine what content and types of content are missing, but don't just automatically post everything as the spam problem gets out of hand.
Finally, my biggest gripe with my Lemmy use is the constant instance wars.
I have had my comments removed for being rightfully critical of Israel by lemmy.world mods. They appear intent on recreating the problems of reddit here.
Posted as a reply because this will certainly upset many but...
On the instance wars:
I constantly see nonsense about the horrors of the '.ML' instance, and 'hexbear', primarily from 'Lemmy.world' users, but I have never once actually come across these horrors.
Hexbear is just a troll instance, ala 'cumtown'.
To an outside observer, '.world' users seem to be US propagandists intent on wrecking the platform. "Tankies this, cowbee that", when I've never seen a cowbee post that wasn't entirely reasonable.
And the vast majority of 'tankies' are just people who criticise the US rightfully while not sharing the same breathe to criticize China.
Ngl, fuck Russia, the US and Russia are the greatest evils. China is not anywhere near the same level. You can praise elements of a foreign state without being a 'tankie'.
It's the same thought terminating cliche cult bullshit that all right wingers do. And it seems to come from Americans being upset their myopic views aren't babied by people who literally specifically went to an instance to avoid them?
Idk I'm not a user of any of the three, but I've only ever had an issue with lemmy.world users in the past, as a UK citizen who is far from a tankie.
Explodingheads was also self-proclaimed a troll instance. Just because they fall back on 'It's just a joke!" doesn't make what they say or do okay.
I recommend you check out !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works for a deep look at Tankies and how prevalent they are throughout Lemmy.
Well, you wouldn't come across hexbear or lemmygrad on pawb.social because it looks like your instance is defederated from them.
Cowbee definitely seems in a sense like a very civil apologist (although with all the trappings of contemporary campism and tankiesm) - and not the worst example by any means, but for every Cowbee there's a BrainInABox type user.
Lol I like BrainInABox better, and I completely disagree with their worldview.
All they do, quite literally, is hurl abuse.
Maybe I'm insensitive or just foolish but to me there's comedy in that.
Oh I agree, it's inherently absurd - and I'm surprised they haven't been banned from basically everywhere else outside of the trio instances (they have been banned from a lot of instances) - but to a lot of people the main issue ignoring Cowbees apologism is the hostility they encounter on there.
If you've ever actually discoursed with Cowbee, note how they ignore the large majority of what you say and hyper-focus exclusively on the talking points that they are trying to convey. It's not a "conversation", it is evangelism.
Thats like 9 out of 10 debates on Lemmy regardless of community. Everyone thinks they are the exception.
A bit ironic from the piefed evangelist.
I don't really think this is true, I engage with the entirety of what people say. As far as I know, you have Lemmy.ml blocked on your piefed account, and we haven't interacted in years, so I'm not sure where you're getting this idea from.
The reason why you haven't seen these horrors is because to you they just look like others like you.
Regardless if you agree with this post, for example, it's propaganda, no different than the american apologists you can accurately identify, the bible thumpling catholics educating the uncivilized people that hadn't heard the healing words of our lord and saviour jesus christ or those who believe everything should be privatized/converted into a free market due to orthodox economic doctrine.
It is propaganda because it operates under the framework that someone who disagrees with a positive association must have not understood a specific sacred text or heard a sacred doctrine, or if they have they must be morally defficient, leaving no room for debate whatsoever.
It's extremely difficult to identify propaganda that caters to our own emotional needs and positive associations.
One of the easiest ways to spot propaganda is the "no room for questioning, let alone disagreeing" aspect. In healthy societies with healthy ideologies there is a legitimate space for disagreement and debate. If there wasn't, power would always remain in the same hands which is one of the aspects most criticize about both capitalism and communism.
And believe it or not, there is more to the world than the right-left west-east dychotomies.
If you look at history, similar ideologigal schisms have happened time and time again in times of shifts in the balance of power, such as when the printing press was invented and the the catholic - lutheran division that came from it. or during the decadence and later fall of the roman republic with the equestrials vs patricians (which originally shared ideological vision).
These largescale violent power struggles always end up boiling down to "you're either with us or against us" which in my opinion is the true poison.
Feel free to disqualify or label me now and have a nice day.
Oh hey, it's worth noting that that particular screengrab is taken out of context and was deliberately intended to make me appear that way. I even concede that one can disagree with Marx and Engels, my point was more against those who claim to agree with them but strongly disagree with the socialist market economy of China. I oppose anyone that tries to treat theory like gospel, that's why I usually don't reference theory directly unless it's directly relevent like it was in this case.
That's the thing, people propagandize about us as well, like the MeanwhileOnGrad crowd that took that snippet out of context. You're doing the same here, by extrapolating an entire behavior of me from a single, out-of-context snippet hosted in a Nazi bar. What's important is that we actually pay attention to what others are saying, because everyone is guilty of thinking they are correct.
But you are a tankie, cowbee. Why do you keep denying this?
Fair enough. Just grabbed one of the first images a search threw. Sorry if it was out of context or portrayed you unfairly. And of course people propagandize about you too. Anyone with a strong enough voice will get bad faith critiques thrown against them and many will be with political intent.
I do think this is a fair example to exemplify the point I was trying to make, though. Your quote being out of context does not nullify its dychotomical political intent and makes my point stronger.
Propaganda is hard to identify when you're predisposed to believe it, it's everywhere and people propagate it without even noticing.
Don't let Cowbee propagandise you, that's what he's known for, even Tankies celebrate him for it.
He doesn't argue in good faith, either, don't believe such nonsense. Just have a look at all the other community posts about his extremism, bigotry and hatred. He's a Tankie full and through and one of the major reasons why Lemmy is destined to fail.
For example, I humbly ask you to challenge Cowbee on his views of North Korea and Putin. You'll find he is openly supportive of both.
I know @Cowbee@lemmy.ml doesn't argue in good faith. You're not arguing in good faith either. If you wanna internet argument fight the dude, I just pinged him for you, but before you do I suggest both of you consider the words of mustache man: "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not himself become a monster."
Sure, there are a lot of bad-faith critiques going around. I do think that your point using me as an example doesn't really work if your example is out of context. The thing about propaganda is that anyone pushing a particular view is propagandizing, but that doesn't mean it's inherently misinformation. Identifying bias is important, as is developing media literacy to see where people are being less than truthful.
Fair
They're websites, one can use two websites. Such a weird take.
Well yeah, it's not like I gave the entire context.
The conversation started about how Ghislaine Maxwell is back moderating on Reddit.
IIRC the EU released a law a few months ago that forces big internet communication platforms to open their API to third-party clients.
this applied to whatsapp i think, i'm not sure whether it also applies to reddit but it might be worth investigating if somebody has too much time on their hands :P
Well technically Reddits API is open to third party clients, it just became prohibitively expensive around the exodus...
Does the new ruling include provisions for where the API has been made functionally unusable? It definitely could, but I wouldn't be surprised if they missed that.
Reddit would probably sooner just lop off their entire EU userbase than comply.
No offense to Europeans because I love y'all, but you are a drop in the bucket for global (English) internet usage.
I think you would be surprised. Obviously UK (if you include it here) would do some heavy lifting for English-language users in Europe using Reddit, a massive chunk of Europe can communicate perfectly well in English on social media platforms and do - and you wouldn't know they aren't American or Anglo unless a topic came up where they would say it, or if you asked them.
To the best of my recollection the last I've seen bits of traffic data here and there, it's large, but not large in comparison to the US and India.
Where does Reddit share data on country of origin for its users?
To moderators. I want to say even to regular users if your comment/post gets enough traction on New Reddit, i.e. hundreds or thousands of views.
Other, similar websites also show such data to those in privileged positions as well. If they're pretty sure you're not a bot, they give it freely. Whatever tier above "average user" and especially "a person interested in growing the website out of self-interest" a given website has, it'll probably be available. I'm sure you can imagine a half dozen that are on the money.
Then let them, we need to stop bending the rules for US companies, we don't need them.
I guess you were not here during the alien.top debacle...
This is exactly what I was doing with Fediverser, and I was really close to implement full two-way bridging, but instead of supporting the effort the great minds of Lemmy decided that the any sort of automated content was spam and unworthy of attention. Instead of looking how the system for onboarding users would make migration 10x simpler, I had to deal with skeptical admins and users who covered their noses at anything or anyone trying to fight Reddit on their grounds.
The problems regarding Reddit-the-corporation are orthogonal to the problems of Reddit-the-online-space. Which types of problems are you referring to here?
Here's my Amateur Coder waving the Wand of Coding idea:
What if we had a FOSS browser extension that scraped Reddit passively, uploading everything you see as you browse (except PII like your username and PMs and such) via bot to Lemmy (on a delay so they can't pinpoint your identity as easily?)
I can't be the only one who splits their time between Lemmy and Reddit, and would much rather participate here than there, but there's much less to comment on here.
My favorite subreddit (/r/tampa) recently perma-banned me for extremely petty reasons, but /c/tampa is a ghost town.
That does sound like a decent idea, that way the content being mirrored would be only that that genuine users accessed.
Perhaps immediately mirroring the content as the browser itself reads it, preventing additional requests that could be flagged.
Only issues are:
- some people don't use reddit whatsover anymore
- many people only browse reddit on mobile
- a browser extension might require too much trust and involvement to generate much output considering the development involved.
Though this does answer some issues and have some clear use cases.
Cheers for the suggestion!
The nice part about my idea is that even with those hurdles in mind, I still proposed it knowing that all it would take is one person to happen upon whichever post or subreddit to auto-scrape and get the discussion on Lemmy going.
Let's be real; 99% of the reason Lemmy is less popular than Reddit is copy+pasting a link, writing your own title, etc. is more effort than 0, therefore the Lemmy-Reddit hybrids like myself don't bother.
Hell, even the staunchly anti-Reddit Lemmites who could be parasitically "stealing" posts and comments to steal Reddit's thunder don't do it. There are other things they'd rather do, evidently.
Now that I think of it, after using the word "scrape," it could be that Reddit ToS follows most websites' in that scraping is explicitly forbidden, so displaying the open source code (or even using it) would incur legal action from Reddit.
Here is my super unpopular take: ultimately you / some / we have misunderstood "quality over quantity".
It doesn't mean "we don't want more users", it means that the best way to attract more users and growth of the platform is to focus on being the best fediverse we can be. Actively trying to attract more users is a foot gun - even in the unlikely event you're successful, you reduce the quality of the experience for everyone.
Focusing instead on the health, vibrance, management, and activity of the platform is the best way to attract more users.
Perhaps another way of saying the same thing: the most fertile market segment are those users who used to be active monthly. They were here trying to participate at some point but lost interest. Why? Pretty solid guess is that they were still logging in to reddit for the special / niche interest subs, and after a few months got sick of checking lemmy.
IMO, dead special interest communities are the cancer consuming the fediverse. Nothing wrong with a small active community, but a small community with a half dozen posts from 3 years ago is a big sign saying "go back to reddit, this place is dead".
This place has always been dead if special interest groups are a measure. There is nothing here and honestly never was…
I'm not disagreeing with you. I didn't say "this place used to be a utopia of special interest content".
There's plenty but. It's only dead if you think you need to be constantly engaged by your phone all day
This is empirically false. Given the context, it is more akin to grocery shopping at a gas station in the middle of nowhere.
No you're wrong, using large words though really helps get your incorrect point across. Much further and you would be strawmanning it
Which word is big there? empiric? akin? or is it grocery? gas? station? middle? Did they edit it out and I missed it?
Good choice shorten the word you knew was the one.
Ok
Would it almost be better to prune old communities? I agree it's off-putting to find community for an interest and seeing last activity like a year ago, doesn't make you want to post since it seems inactive.
One thing about how reddit/lemmy works though is people subscribed (assumedly still active on Lemmy elsewhere) might still see that content vs a forum where no activity means very few visit the site.
That might be an option. I personally would be fine with that but I've noticed that many / most users get very upset about the notion that posts / communities / users are impermanent ?
Another solution is to simply promote these dead communities - if anyone is interested in warming them up then they should do so. If they're consistent then after a few months ask existing mods to add them as mods, or ask admins to do so if the mods are not responsive.
This approach runs the risk that the person doing the work may not become a mod, but honestly I don't think being a mod should be the objective of creating a community.
Yeah, I just thought about my suggestion more and one thing I think that has given reddit so much staying power is the fact content sticks around so long, I'd imagine many of us here would specifically search in reddit for reviews or help with something and found a like 3 year old thread with the answer.
So... Pruning is probably a bad idea lol.
Unfortunately threadiverse searchability is pretty bad, assumedly because of the nature of the fediverse with content being copied across instances essentially I am sure its a little more difficult for an indexer to properly handle it, not to mention somehow deciding which instance to specifically link to for a certain thread. On top of that, it wouldn't surprise me if all the corpo search engines would deprioritize most fediverse sites out of self preservation 🤷
On the "warming them up" that makes sense in theory, but usually if I'm making a rare post it's to engage with a group of people, if I don't see the engagement I'm probably not going to go there again to post whatever it is because what's the point if no one sees it anyway?
I mean "warming up" a community intentionally.
For example, one of the subs I regularly read on reddit is /r/audiobooks, looking for recommendations et cetera. The audiobook communities here are dead.
If I want to adopt one of those dead communities here, I could just decide to make several posts a week for a few months. Thereafter, if I'm still keen, and still haven't had any interaction from the existing mods, I could approach the admin of that instance and make my case for being appointed as a mod.
I kind of don't like the idea of deleting posts.
Maybe we should put a pinned post at the top of each dead community that just says "go here instead"
Like if there's a dead community for a game, there could be a pinned post that directs you to a more general community like for the genre
Like we could do !TheWalkingDeadGame@retrolemmy.com directing to !adventuregames@retrolemmy.com
EDIT: https://retrolemmy.com/post/31846510
Pruning is a bad idea imo. Old communities here (like on reddit) can be great resources for solutions to technical problems, for example. And weird one-off communities that have like 2 memes from a decade ago can be really funny when you get linked to them.
Perhaps a notification-type nag, a tab of "communities you used to use but haven't posted to for a while" but with a snappier title, alongside "local" and "all".
Just to give you an example, I help mod a community called !askusa@discuss.online where we wanted to open up a space to discuss topics of interest to people in the USA, yet remain a safe space away from politics.
What then is there for us to talk about, these days, that does not involve politics?!?!? (this btw was the topic of my 2nd-to-last post, six months ago now)
I do not need a nagging reminder to help me realize what is happening here... :-(
and now PieFed supports moving posts! https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta/p/1653370/piefed-1-5-is-released-move-posts-upload-video-files-better-chat-and-more
So Piefed admins/mods could consolidate communities by moving the posts before deleting the community
oh that's a great feature
That's the position we have at !fedigrow@lemmy.zip , still every time we suggest to close a dead community people show up and argue that consolidating communities is turning this place into Reddit.
I’m happy to promote it. I tried to get a few non-technical people to check it out. They felt it was too complicated. I’ve shared it with tech friends and coworkers who use Reddit. They’re aware of Lemmy to varying degrees, and are not enthused about moving to another platform despite hating Reddit.
I think it’s because despite Lemmy being a great alternative, it is more complicated and lacks the user base that users of other social media platforms have.
Bluesky is marginally more complicated than Twitter, but compared to Mastodon it is user friendly. Bluesky worked to create a dedicated, easy to use app that most users use.
Bluesky existed for a while before experiencing explosive growth. This occurred during moments of controversy with X. Bluesky capitalized on these moments, with champions on both platforms that led their followers to change, and there were mechanisms in place to bootstrap a user’s feed with the followers and topics that they had in the other place.
I think Lemmy needs to follow this model. There needs to be a Lemmy app that has a user experience as similar as possible with the Reddit app. It also needs champions that have main stream recognition (George Takei, Mark Hamill, etc.) that can be willing to make noise about switching from Reddit to Lemmy when the next controversy occurs. Repeat with more and more promotion by this evangelists, and Lemmy could grow.
This is an Us problem. Download jerboa. Create an account on world. Done. Simple as Reddit. We make it complicated by explaining federation, options, different instances, etc. None of that matters to the masses.
This. So much of this.
I see the same with any federated platform. People are excited to explain how complicated and clever and different services and integrations and... Shut the fuck up.
App, sign-up, post, like, subscribe. Done.
People will learn the rest if it is important enough to them to master
We can make our decentralised network more popular by centralising it feels like an own goal...
If you're suggesting to your friends you can pick whichever instance you want, but the point is you should choose for them and don't even tell them that there is a choice
I mean, that is how I recommend linux distros to people :)
It depends what you want. If you want lots of people to join, you need to make it easy to join.
That doesn't mean we need to get rid of decentralization. You could have a federated joining mechanism that assigned people randomly to any willing instance. Forcing the user to pick is the problem.
The trouble is a random joining procedure will absolutely launch users into unsuitable instances for their personality, political positions.
Yeah, we need defaults tonget people signed up. When it's too difficult for the average user, they'll go where it's easier.
I followed the directions my instance of choice had posted, also use jerboa. It was a few steps, but the directions given were simple. It didn't take me long at all to sign up.
I still don't fully understand federation, but I knew even less when I began here a few years ago. I do like using jerboa
I could not find Jerboa in the App Store. I use Voyager. We need Lemmy.
This is such an underrated point. If we want people to join Lemmy, we need an app called Lemmy, on every platform. And if we want to steal users from Reddit, make the UI a clone of the reddit app but better. And allow people to join via the app, not some separate website.
Or maybe people just need to stop saying "Lemmy" and instead say "Voyager", or "Boost for Lemmy" or whatever app they would suggest to use?
It's like Linux, I don't suggest people to install Linux because that's not a thing, I suggest they install Bazzite or Fedora KDE, or whatever I think will suit them best
Most people would see "use Voyager or boost" to be akin to "use Reddit or Instagram". Because why would there be more than one app to connect to the app.
It's wrong, but any time you break from a standard assumption you require thinking. Once you require thinking, you lose anyone who isn't otherwise motivated.
Yea true.
I didn't mean you should tell people "use Voyager or Boost for Lemmy"
I meant you should tell people "use Voyager" or "use Boost for Lemmy" or whatever app you think they would like, but just 1
Also SSO should be released with Lemmy 1.0.
Then you can just login with your Google account
If someone were to create a Markhamill@lemmy.world account, someone else can simply spin up a Markhamill@lemmings.world, and a Markhamill@Markhamilllemmy.world, and so on. Nobody is ever going to believe that any of those are actually Mark Hamill (especially since none are:-).
Doesn't Lemmy have any sort of profile cross-identification like Mastodon has?
Absolutely none. Some users do things like list their own alts, though these can fall out of date, and are entirely optional.
Lemmy (and PieFed) allows you to migrate your blocklists and community subscriptions, and PieFed will even pull in all old posts from a community to help migrate it over, though there is still a disconnection point between the new PieFed account for people vs. their old Lemmy account, which are separated.
Some people, like Blaze, create alts all across the Threadiverse for unrelated reasons - primarily since Lemmy reports do not actually federate (though PieFed ones do, see report) - while other people specifically grab other people's account names just to troll them (or at least some of those alts claim that much:-P), leading to all manner of confusion as to who is then trolling who.
I was mostly using alts to federate communities before Lemmy-federate got created.
Nowadays thanks to Piefed personal feeds I mostly only use this one'
But then how do you mod communities, specifically Lemmy ones, when those reports do not federate (though PieFed ones reportedly do)?
Those are not "Blaze" alts, I have specific alts for that, but they aren't recognizable
Nani? It's 2026, getting an account on some lemmy and start posting is nearly two orders of magnitude easier than trying to sign up to an email account!
That people are brainrotten due to excessive Fortnite and Instagram is,
unfortunately, not our problem. At some point, the answer is "just get better users".Singing up for a Google account is such a pain, they've gotten worse over time
The difference is people think they NEED a Google account, but not a Lemmy account
And answers like this are exactly why non techies don't join and we get posts like this. You're the problem
I posted in an ADHD community about how I'm fed up with managing my symptoms and I think I finally need to talk to a professional. Someone tried to blame my symptoms on capitalism.
As someone who simply left Reddit because they took away RIF and only stays here because I'm stubborn, Lemmy is the left wing version of Truth Social. A great deal of the users here are the absolute embodiment of the people from Sanfrancisco in South Park huffing each others farts about how progressive they are.
Like, I get it and I do agree in principle on most things with Lemmy which is the only reason I dont leave, but make no mistake THE FEDIVERSE IS AN ECHO CHAMBER.
I'd say a few instances are indeed, but overall I find it ranges from far left to centerish, where as TS ranges from far right.
VERSE IS AN ECHO CHAMBER...
I wanted to see it and did take a look into your profile: That was one user and he was rightfully criticized and downvoted for that stupid post. It's not great that this happened, but I'm not sure if it is fair to judge all of us here based on that
I really don't mind that the fediverse is an echo chamber. I'm in no way interessted in having conversations with fascists.
Your response is an example of what frustrates me with Lemmy. Anyone with a different opinion must be a fascist. No nuance. Just instantly labelling people. No wonder the numbers are dropping and not attracting new users.
Guess what? We can have people who aren't far left who aren't fascists. I'd rather see healthy discussions and debates than everyone patting each other on the back for saying "DAE capitalism bad".
I'm not saying people either agree with me or they're fascist. I'm saying I am completely fine with it being an echo chamber, if it means the fascists don't get to speak. I'm not calling everyone slightly to the right of me fascist, I'm completely fine with them. I'm saying actual fascists shouldn't get to have a voice, and I am very happy that they rarely get one here.
I know there tends to be a disagreement about this on Lemmy, but this is also what I have observed.
For example, If someone has a computer problem and its windows, there’s a good chance the top comment will be “Stop, use linux”. Almost any conversation can turn into “you’re supporting capitalism”. It discourages people from wanting to post and engage, because of the likely hood of something turning into an argument. Not everyone has the mental bandwidth for it, and they just want a place to come and chill.
Hell I used to be active in making Cassettefuturism grow when lemmee was a thing, and we’d get people coming into that niche community to argue with us about our hobby.
The difference between Reddit and Lemmy was that niche communities would usually not hit the front page and you could be off in your own little corner. Here since things are smaller, you are more likely to run into some niche communities through discovery.
I guess it is? But so is every other online forum. The fediverse as a whole just seems to attract a certain group of people, and I think that is fine. If I signed up to a diy forum I would also expect to mostly interact with people interested in diy.
(First comment btw, op finally convinced me)
I wonder if we can combine the related fediverse services (like piefed, which is getting more and more traction lately), mbin/kbin, and others.
Because according to this graph I dont exist for example. Im not a "lemmy" user, but I sure interact with a lot of lemmy.
There is also a number of instances that are chosing not to give their numbers anymore either because of AI scrappers getting really aggressive, or because they just dont want to be seen by the different tracking software out there.
they are separate, but not huge
https://piefed.fediverse.observer/stats
https://mbin.fediverse.observer/stats
Agreed. This seems like the lowest hanging fruit, the absolute minimal solution.
Given the emergence of Bluesky and the parallel rightwing echo chambers, the fediverse does not have the luxury of splittism IMO.
WDYM? That will just make the graph look less terrible but not address the problem.
I tell people about lemmy and send them links. Mostly people don't care about anything. Abstract or remote things like "should a platform be owned by one asshole?" just doesn't even enter their brain.
I think posting quality content (or at least trying to be quality content hahaha) and good comments keep the users visiting back.
I just try to post one or two posts a day (to not spam things), comment a little bit, it seems it grows some communities on our instance. Some communities were dead, now at least some people post at these places.
Reddit refugee here. I've been banned three times in 2 weeks for erroneous applications of nebula's policies. They appear to be going through a self-destructive phase. All you need to be is a viable alternative to a dumpster fire and deliver a clear valuable alternative.
Alright, I'll make more content. Give me a month or two. I'm slow at drawing.
From my own experience with Lemmy, I can absolutely see why it's declining.
Lemmy is packed full of miserable people constantly calling for violence. 90% of the feed is packed full of US politics, it doesn't matter how many filters I use I still see that greasy orange cunt's face every time I open Lemmy.
The amount of hostility towards outsiders just getting into Lemmy is astounding, and I've absolutely seen the whole "quality over quantity" crap that only drives people away from the platform. The IT tech snobbery is also incredibly offputting to people who aren't tech enthusiests.
In short, Lemmy has a toxic shithead problem that a platform this small can't afford if it wants to survive long term.
Yeah the corn movement barely helped and you still have people whining or raging in the comments regardless of subject matter. I just want muh memes
I’ve seen a rise in calls to violence. This is not cool.
Fully agree. Its user base is self selecting for the people who are most easily fed up with the mainstream platforms (i.e. Reddit). It seems like the most eager to jump ship set up camp first and it has resulted in an extremely sanctimonious community. They don't want more users. They want everyone to be exactly like them.
Which wasn’t the case early on, from my experience. Instead, when Lemmy had its first big boom it was filled with people looking for a non-toxic, real conversation. I still find that to be the case in replies, but my front page tends to be filled with stories where commenters are dissimilar to Reddit, less intellectual responses and more edgy hyperbole.
Seriously though, the people responding to political posts with thinly veiled calls to harm or kill political leaders need to be banned on the spot. Absolutely intolerable.
i noticed alot of the political posts has subtle tankie infilitration in it, try to stir shit to cause drama, because thier own instances isnt getting traffic because its been defederate, they often hide the purpose of the post , under the guise "the other opinion"
reddit itself already bans this type of behaviour, and any vague suggestion of it, which is pretty problematic itself.
Sad but true
Other than that, It's a pretty good platform
Okay, now let's see Piefed and mbin users!
If I had a nickel for each time someone reminds me that mbin exists, I'd have two nickels, which is not much but it is weird that it's happened twice.
It seems strange that these two curves so closely match eachother in shape.
When 6month active users drop that means 6 months ago a user stopped using the platform.
When monthly active users drop that means a month ago a user stopped using the platform.
So this would suggest that there is a correlation between user attrition 6 months ago and last month.
it kinda correlates with what the "p47" have done controversial and it also correlates with/timing of reddits purges too.
But they should be offset. Monthly MAU departures shouldn't reflect in half-year until 5 months later. And half-year departures shouldn't influence the MAU at all.
The fact that they line up to they day strikes me as very suspicious.
But I'm not a statistician
I just don't get why people would stay in reddit when lemmy exist :(
Because Lemmy, to this day, doesn't do what Reddit does. Yes, the UI is similar, but there's two big downsides to Reddit. One that's important now, and one that's important later.
This horrible scalability means that right now instances are getting close to their limits (see e.g. lemm.ee closing down exactly due to these reasons).
Lemmy has 40-50k monthly active users. Reddit has 5.16 billion monthly active users, so about 100 000x. If everyone on Reddit were to move over to Lemmy, Lemmy would be done. Just one day of Reddit-level traffic would be enough to jam up the history of Lemmy content so much that nobody could ever afford hosting a Lemmy instance again.
Eh, if the original instance removes the CSAM - the ban and removal federates out to everywhere else, so this isn't always true.
As for the scaling of Lemmy - absolutely, but it'll never get to Reddit sized levels. Down the line, the answer here would be for the federative structure to change so that an instance only hosts its own local content, and doesn't need duplicate content viewed from external instances.
That's not why lemm.ee closed down. It wasn't financial.
But if it doesn't, then other instances removing the content on their side doesn't federate. So you can either trust every instance that you federate with with your legal security, or you will have to moderate everything yourself as well, just in case someone missed something.
This would be extremely important, but I don't know if such a low level conceptual change can still be performed with a reasonable amount of work. Remember, for such a change you need to get every instance on board. That would be difficult now, and only more difficult later.
Tbh, it would have been much smarter if the setup would be basically a bunch of independent phpBB-like boards with federated single-sign-on and an app that transparently connects you to whatever instance hosts the content you are looking at.
No, it was specifically because of the moderation issue: https://lemmy.ca/post/45390962
Sure, you're right there - but an instance that kept having problems with removing CSAM would find itself defederated.
Well it would be built in from Lemmy or Piefed. The devs would have to spearhead it. But were the load ever to get to that point, I suspect that would be the obvious move.
Yes, so not financial. You seemed to be implying it was financial.
Depends... Imagine it also contains some of the most relevant communities and defederating would mean you lose users. That's not such an easy decision any more. Also, at that point hosting would likely be so expensive that for-profit instances would emerge, and for those defederating an important community wouldn't be such an easy choice either.
But it's not only CSAM. For example, there's illegal speech in quite a few parts of the world. In Germany, for example, a lot of nazi-related stuff is illegal. In russia or china some regime-critical speech is illegal. I wouldn't be too surprised if the US also joins this club sometime in the near future.
Actually, if you are a non US citizen and you and you want to travel to the USA, it's already troublesome if you are hosting a website with anti-Trump content.
That kind of stuff is unlikely to be deleted on the original instance if that instance isn't hosted in the same country.
Sorry if that came across. I said lemm.ee was shutdown because of the scaling issue. I could have been more clear with that I meant the moderation scaling issues.
I don't think that would save it, to be honest.
People would just clone the communities on other instances and rebuild.
I suspect eventually lemmy/piefed federation will not be automatic, but subject to approval.
No-one cares what Russia or China thinks here. Germany? I mean, sure, but this is also a complication for any regulatory bodies trying to police social media sites. As "Lemmy" or "Piefed", as you know, are not singular entities.
Yeah, in part because they had a "no defederation" policy which came to bite them back.
I don't know if you've convinced me to stay or go, but you've certainly convinced me of either or.
Wasn't trying to convince anyone of anything. Just offering a reality check.
Lemmy vs Reddit is like this meme where the one side says "I hate you" and the other side says "Who are you?" (or was it "I don't even think of you", can't remember).
Lemmy is cool. It being small has benefits and I like the political direction here much more than on Reddit. I like that most people I interact with on Lemmy genuinely are humans. On Reddit, that's much more difficult to be certain of.
But Lemmy is not Reddit, it's not a Reddit alternative, it's not even a Reddit competitor. It's a nice little niche forum, a little anti-capitalist experiment, that kinda copied the UI and UX of old Reddit. That's totally fine and it's got it's value. Otherwise I wouldn't have >3000 comments on this platform.
But it's a factor of 100 000x off of being on the radar of Spez and his crew.
I think the reason is similar with Windows and Linux.
Deleted by moderator
Personally, I like the smaller userbase. Higher levels of freedom speech are still valuable even if only 1000 people may see your post/comment, rather than having you blocked by incompetent AI filter with no way to fight back.
Lemmy is great in the techy/gaming, memes, and news/politics fields, but doesn't have strong secondary communities. I no longer have a reddit account but still lurk to keep up with news focused in Ukraine, Japan, Korea, music, history, minecraft, etc.
Also, social media uses the same tactics as casinos to keep people hooked. I remember a podcast in which they compared the new algorithms to slot machines where sometimes you "win" by getting content you're looking for, sometimes you lose by getting fed random crap you didn't search, and mostly you break even & get fed the same repetitive crap (this makes the times you "win" seam more rewarding.) Social media is an addiction and cancerous to modern society.
Reddit is bots. People are on tiktok or Instagram or whatever.
Because reddit coddles nazis and lemmy doesn't.
Also niche communities exist on reddit that lemmy doesn't have the population to support.
I disagree. If Lemmy was plagued with Nazis, it would down the shitter pretty fast.
I don't want nazis here either and I'm glad that lemmy remains hostile to them. I was responding to someone who asked why people stayed on reddit. Given reddit's userbase, they're staying because they're welcome. We shouldn't welcome nazis.
We got tankies on here, though. Not much better.
What's a tankie and what makes them close to Nazis?
@dudesss @Tattorack
Tankie is a pejorative term used to refer to Marxist-Leninists, which was appropriated by Marxist-Leninists themselves at some point.
And equating them with Nazis is basically anti-communism. That's the shortest answer.
Similar to equating feminists with sexists, and anti-racists with racists.
I don't know if those who say this are stupid or dishonest, but I'm not going to waste my time giving free history lessons.
Bye and have a nice day.
A tankie is a kind of person who likes Imperialism and expansionism so long as it comes from something related to, as the other user said, Marxist-Leninism.
The origin of Marxist-Leninism is Russia, so they support Russia invading things, and committing warcrimes, and make all sorts of excuses for such acts.
Today they're primarily in support of the Russian side in the Russo-Ukranian war, do not consider it an invasion of a sovereign nation, and consider it fully justified as an act to oppose "NATO expansion".
Essentially, to a tankie, nothing "goes too far" if they can somehow connect it to a Marxist-Leninist agenda, and behave the same way about Putin as a right-wing American behaves about Trump.
Nearly forgot; the name "tankie" comes from how Russia overwhelmingly uses tanks to invade territories.
Oh, I don't think I've witnessed one here.
Too bad centrists think everyone with any criticism whatsoever of anything they do is a tankie.
Haven't seen that happen yet.
That speaks more to your lack of criticism.
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i remember hearing about when the empire State building was first built, the would light up some of the offices to make it look busy, to attract other people.
I came here looking for something different than Reddit but I’m actually pretty done. I try to post, start threads and conversations but the ones that don’t get deleted because of some vague rule get questioned to hell as to why it exists that it makes me wish I hadn’t posted at all.
I've lost track of how many subs I've been banned from cause I pissed off a friend of a mod.
oh i was regularly switching to a new account thats been warmed, up after multiple sub bans. up until reddit caught up, and just banned everyone with accts associated with other accts that were sub banned, but unbanned due to a time limit. and now reddit just straight up bans people for inactivity and new accts. mods love to misconstrue your comment,
I was actually talking about here on Lemmy. Though I have been banned from a few subs on reddit as well.
How, dude? I've never even gotten a warning from a mod.
Goes to 'All --> New,' here we go again...
Come on everyone, let's do our part. The only way to get less doom and gloom on the main page is to engage with the stuff you want early. Like it was mentioned by others, that primarily means comments not just upvotes
Yeah, same here. Let’s try to post more fun content on here
I recently had a long opinion post I made get downvoted. What upset me wasn't that someone disagreed with me, it was that they didn't take the time to explain their own contradicting position, because I wanted to figure out if I had something to learn there.
Lemmy doesn't have the niche communities and people don't want to take the time to customise what it can do for them so get stuck in the same shit as reddit, so then they leave.
One thing I've noticed with Lemmy is that it feels way more like a social bookmarking and commentary platform. I see fewer posts that are "original content" here than for example Reddit.
This and just so much negativity. I'm not saying the posts are wrong, but I often leave this site feeling worse than when I got on. It has the shortest daily app timer on my phone. Not good for engagement or growth
I have kind of the opposite experience. When I go on reddit, I feel depressed and angry, when I go on Lemmy I laugh and learn stuff. Probably the communities I subscribe to though. I get political and regional news from Reddit (and don't have an actual reddit account anymore). I get funny science and Star Trek memes from Lemmy and cyber security and tech news.
Most of the fun communities I've found are pretty dead so my feed is just full of world and tech news that is usually sad, aggravating, or misleading. No, I don't need another story of battery technology I'll never use on my feed.
mander.xyz for science articles and memes.
startrek.website and tenforward@lemmy.world for star trek memes.
cybersecurity@sh.itjust.works for cybersecurity news, but not a lot of discussion.
The self hosting communities on lemmy.ml and lemmy.world are pretty active and good at answering questions.
Where are you that you are having these experiences? I find Lemmy hard to explore.
This is quite concerning indeed.
We should start by being better at retaining what we already have.
Every person is valuable now.
I'm worried that mods here are starting to abuse their power as have happened on Reddit and have seen some instances of it. A lot of people fled Reddit because of it and will not stick around for the same bullshit here.
So making mechanisms to prevent this kind of behavior must be a priority.
Much progress has already been made.
In Lemmy, the federated nature offers freedom not so much to the end user but to instance admins who can pack up and move or even make changes to the codebase rather than simply blindly deploy each new version.
PieFed takes this several additional notches forward by allowing democratization of moderation, e.g. rather than a community making it a rule to allow "no USA politics", instead users can turn on their own keyword filters, or a much gentler rule of "USA politics must use the USA community flair", thereby allowing the decision to remain in the hands of the end-users rather than one mod team ruling them all.
Then don't ever say anything that someone might disagree with or...
I have seen people banned with no reason given, just left to wonder what happened...
Yeah, and at least Reddit sent notifications to tell people that their content was removed. Also there's a modmail allowing people to ask questions. Also a post was merely removed from the community stream, but allowing discussions in it to continue including answers as to why it was removed, rather than deleted entirely and for all eternity, destroying all of the conversations that had taken place therein, even between users unrelated to the person posting that supposedly triggered the removal, i.e. innocent bystanders.
Lemmy has turned out to be just as if not more authoritarian than Reddit - not to the instance admins tbf but to the individual users. And moreover, the amount of such seems to mainly increase over time, e.g. mod names are now obscured in the modmail even if you go looking into it, and soon Lemmy.ml will become baked into the codebase as the source of new communities, giving it veto power if it wants a new instance to not sign up to anything defederated from lemmy.ml. Centralized, authoritarian control is not what most of us signed up for when attempting to flee Reddit.
Fortunately PieFed is fighting that trend mightily, e.g. allowing democratization of moderation features. Though even PieFed does not send a notification when someone is banned or their content removed (in this case though likely just low priority as it is still being developed, at a much quicker pace than Lemmy, rather than with lemmy.ml being an actual choice to do things a certain way).
I recently noticed that when a user gets banned, all of their posts and associated threads also get removed but with no notice.
I've also seen entire discussions removed because they included some heated words, despite also including useful discussion or even one sided rebuttals. While I'm under no illusion that things can get solved here, it's annoying to see shit get deleted just because someone got upset. Even if there isn't anything useful in comments, it breaks up the discussion because any replies have lost context.
IMO if it's a disruptive user, ban them, but leave the evidence of their disruption up, unless it was spam or the kind of illegal shit that can get anyone who sees it in trouble.
Hehe, check out one of PieFed's latest new features: Deleted posts and their comments can still be read. Mods can either delete entirely (if as you say illegal or some shit) or simply remove from the normal display from the community thread, but leaving the discussion intact - e.g. answers to questions that people would like to preserve, even when the OP deletes their own post.
In short, each person is the owner of their "own" content - like a question asked to a question community - but the resulting answers and discussion do not belong to them, but rather to the individuals who offered those answers in good faith, hence are now allowed to remain (it takes active participation i.e. it is opt-in, but now it is an option whereas before it was not).
We can create our own Lemmy instances though, and with piefed, we are on our way to a better Reddit!
And with America rouge, Reddit will go up in a Mushroom cloud anyway.
I'm going to be frank.
I'm highly empathetic, and studied history, sociology, economics, international relations, and a few other subjects in university. I dabble in reading as well.
It's really, really hard for me to stomach the news coming out of the US right now. I'm Australian, so in comparison I live in a utopia. But I just want to cry whenever I see how innocent people are being hurt in the US, Venezuela, Palestine, or really anywhere else. I get angry when I see how the US government, and many others are fucking everything up right now. Things don't have to be like this.
There is so much American news on this platform. There is so much bad news in general. I don't come to the internet to stress and worry. I come here to learn stuff about niches and chill out. And every time I'm on Lemmy I'm left with the same bad feelings I get from reading world news subreddits.
Let me be clear; I have no problem with the fact that American news gets posted. It's that when I get on the lemmy.zip or lemmy.world page, some days 9/10 links are to American news, that is very, very, bad news. It makes me miserable.
So why should I be here instead of just switching off? I love Lemmy, but I find that I just can't justify coming on here. It makes me feel awful.
I really feel you. I recently started aggressively blocking all politics-related communities. It does help a lot. Feed is much emptier, obviously, but it's still the right move i guess.
I'll have to do that, but a non-zero amount of posts leak through into other communities. I did find out I can just filter posts by keywords using uBlock Origin.
Actually, could you please screenshot your filter list? I'd really like to just block them all without going through the effort of having to find them.
mostly these
Legendary 👊 thanks mate
If you move to piefed.zip, you have more control over your feed via keyword filters.
Thanks, I made an account. Waiting for my activation email :)
Block those communities, if you want.
But Americans are very hostile and angry people, and yes it's true that anger boils all over lemmy now in a way it didn't even a few months ago.
There are just a lot of people who go around wanting to pound everything with all the anger they are harboring.
I’m feeling very burnt out. Lemmy is kinda an endless stream of political doom and gloom. For context, I’m in the US and already stressed out by our political situation. But I don’t come here to see more doom and gloom. It’s getting to the point where I think I need to get off for my mental health.
Then there are all the people who if you don’t agree exactly with their opinion they downvote you to hell. You have left leaning politics but not my flavor of left? Downvote! You hate enshitification and big tech privacy practices, but you use a single piece of software that isn’t FOSS? Downvote!
It’s so exhausting. I absolutely hate Reddit but I miss going on there and just laughing at how someone’s TV is too high. I miss laughing at how some restaurant serves food of shovels instead of plates.
And that’s not even getting into the lack of content. That part I understand requires users like myself to be as active as possible. But it’s hard being active when I feel so burnt out from the other stuff here.
Tbh, idk if these issues are specific to Lemmy or just the internet as a whole. I can only speak to the slice of the internet I find myself in. But I just wanna see people that are excited about things: photography, 3d printing, weird keyboards, etc. And that exists here, but it’s drowned out by all the doom and gloom.
Sorry to hear.
Maybe try to use an alt with only light hearted communities? That's what I do on my main feed, it helps quite a lot with the negativity.
Disable the display of the voting system. That's what I do, and it's the reason I can use Lemmy. It won't solve the political doom and gloom part, but it really helped me with the anxiety that comes from the rejection of others to my ideas, or the dopamine boost when a collective accepts and praises my comments. Try it.
What you're describing isn't Lemmy specific I think, same happens of you browse the news feed of reddit (and most probably also other social media).
What helps me is subscribing to non-political topics and scrolling through your own feed of non-political stuff instead of the main site... gardening, hobbies, memes... that's what these sites once ought to be made for. Not 24/7 political bombardment.
Sidenote: Digital detox also helps for sure '^^
Agreed lemme is probably one of the most negative places on the Internet. I joined because I was hoping this place would grow to be a proper alternative for Reddit, with fun niche content, and its own culture of obscure inside jokes. Instead even after several years it still feels like we are the angry trolls living under reddit's shadow.
One of the biggest things I've found that helped me avoid the politics was to leave lemme.world and fill my personal feed up with subscriptions to content that fits my interest. Politics has ways of working its way into content none the less, but at least I've got a fighting chance.
I really do believe lemme is going to struggle to find people who want to stick around unless it starts to embrace fun light hearted content. I'm not sure how we'd do that as a platform, but I do believe that's one of the big reasons people will struggle to adopt this corner of the Internet as their own.
I guess the problem are the users (you and me) or better or use of plattforms itself.
On reddit I tended to be lurker. And if most of us are the few which actually POST content are the those with strong (mostly political) views who are willing to commit to their cause by flooding the zone with political fights.
Coclusion:
If we want a cozy lemmy we need to join/start non-political, subject specific communities and actually CONTRIBUTE something instead of just consuming. Otherwise this cluster of plattforms will end up like all the other due to the same reasons.
parts of lemmy are. cool rocks is pretty positive. there are other positive places. it's one of those GIGO things.
Indeed, I believe that the Fediverse is a paradise island where one can escape the noise created mainly by AI bots on centralised, proprietary social networks, but many users get a dopamine rush from eliciting an emotional response on the network, and that rush is provided by Reddit's algorithms.
Join !cool_rocks@lemmy.today if you're sick of doom.
It's just cool rocks and discussions about rocks.
I can understand this a lot. I wanted to escape the doom and gloom of politics (also American) and I have found that if I'm going to have communities I want, I'm gonna have to make some. lol I'm a big Azur Lane player and have been trying to add content to the Azur Lane communities on !azurlane@sh.itjust.works and !azurlane@discuss.online.
I think a lot of what happens is those who enjoy political discourse have been coming here so a lot of that content is predominate. Creating alternative communities of interest may be the only way to balance it out.
But I'm just spitballing here.
i'm sick of how awful and ignorant the vast majority of comments here are. and how they have to conflated outlandish beliefs with being morally correct.
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When this post is two days old and still on the very top of my feed you know that it's either a ghost town or the sorting algo doesn't work.
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So relative dating doesn't work. It says 2 days, and many things on my front page say 2 days old, which has been true for a while.
i am still surprised that 800 people commented. i never saw 800 people under a single post so it must be pretty dang important to people
Are you filtering by "active"?
Some of us are still fighting in the replies.
It's just less busy. So conversations on one topic go on for longer, is that such a bad thing?
I think he is filtering by active which keeps posts still receiving lots of comments very high.
Seems like it. That's what I do and it is the same for me. But I like it that way.
It can be both.
I think that if we want new folks, it would make a big difference is we organized the equivalent of a new member drive.
Currently, look at a default front page for your home instance and ask how enticing it is to a total newbie. There might be some good stuff, but it's foreign and overwhelming. You feel out of place.
Now imagine if the first Friday of January had been "new subscriber day". People on Reddit and Bluesky are taking about the fediverse and if it's any good. And on Lemmy there's a bunch of posts about finding the best instances and memes about being new on Lemmy. That's a much more inviting beginner experience, and it makes it more likely for folks to come back the next day.
I really think planning for bursts of new folks is the way to welcome people.
Piefed has a better onboarding mechanism
Can I ask a different, more difficult question?
Where are people going?
Lemmy Isn't Quite It? Mastodon is too formal. Blusky is too political.
Lemmy was a clone of Reddit. Not an improvement on it.
Lemmy/Piefed is defederated. I feel like that in itself is an improvement.
I'm not saying it's not an improvement but it's not sufficient, either
What is your ideal reddit experience, so to speak?
Reddit circa 2013.
However, I'd like to take note that the world itself was far different in 2013. We're asking for 2013 politic levels when the current world is obsessed with politics and some countries are within five years of a civil war, mine in particular.
Well that's not really something a platform can change, is it?
Nope, just the landscape, but who's to say bored Lemmy users are going back to Reddit? They likely moved on, or settle for Mastodon, or like me, chats rather than forums.
Reddit hasn't exactly improved, trading "meh" for "eh".
if I knew, I wouldn't ask tbh...
And I at least was mostly lurking on reddit, as well, only commenting occasionally.
most likely going back to reddit, its where all the drama, politics are.
Reddit I think
Back to reddit I imagine.
I left, in a way. Lemmy was my main stomping ground. Now it's XMPP.
I don't need Reddit, I need engagement.
"Blusky is too political"
This feels like a very weird reason to not like bluesky, when there are many other reasons.
I'm a very new user who wanted to give this a chance, here are the friction points from my point of view:
In short the user experience is abysmal.
The solution to this is that people should not recommend Lemmy, but a specific instance such as programming.dev (depending on the audience). The Lemmy software and join-lemmy.org are mainly targeted at potential instance admins, or those who are already familiar with the Fediverse.
Well, you are technically correct. That would've made it easier for me. But I see a few problems with that:
How are you gonna make sure people start doing this?
And even more important: If people start doing this, it might actually harm the network IMHO.
I personally knew that something like Lemmy exists at all because I saw multiple people on Reddit recommending it as an alternative to Reddit. Often enough that I was able to remember this after some time.
Now if people recommended programming.dev in one sub, literature.cafe in another and discuss.online in a third - there is no way I would've remembered any of it and most likely wouldn't know that it belongs to the same network. Looking at them individually emphasizes the feeling that those are some ultra niche little sites with hardly any users on them.
Just my gut feeling, anyway.
That is true. I made a post just now to gather suggestions for improving the website, please have a look and comment if you have any ideas: https://lemmyverse.link/lemmy.ml/post/41719890
Do you sort by active? Use hot or scaled instead.
Yeah, no idea why Active is still the default.
Yeah, it was sorted by active. Changed it to hot, let's see how that goes. Thanks for the hint.
Active is basically like old forum logic, where new comments will bump it up back to the top. Scaled is my go to view first as it does a pretty good job balancing out communities of widely different sizes, so smaller communities that you're subbed to have a chance of having their post be seen if it's new and larger in upvoter count.
Scaled is great for Subscribed, but I don't like Scaled+All
Scaled+All is hell on earth, but to be be fair it's not its fault. It's just... what Scaled is there to do. Thus works wonders in Subscribed, I'd argue it even works wonder on local unless you specifically need newest local-relevant content (eg.: local news).
Ah true, I generally avoid all until I'm out of subscribed content or just looking for new communities
Yeah I don't use All often
I usually switch sorting options when I start seeing a lot of the same stuff, or when I get to the point where the furry shit starts to appear. Keeps things somewhat fresh most days.
You can say that again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy
Really muddles up the search results about lemmy.
Names are a discrete and contested domain and honestly I don't see how Lemmy being also a person is a hindrance. Coke is also a drug yet no one complains, certainly not the big corpo.
Protip: you can search for more than one word on search providers. Something like "lemmy social" or "lemmy server" for example.
It just makes it more annoying to search for anything lemmy related
Lemmy standing for "Marxist-Leninist" surely is off-putting to some. Might be better to re-brand it as "Feddit" (federated Reddit).
Have you considered trying out Piefed? Piefed has custom feed options currently.
I don't really know how you make the onboarding, the instance selection easier at this point. What do you propose?
What site did you use when you found lemmy?
I'm a reddit user and that's also where I first heard about lemmy the first time.
Yesterday I decided to give it a try, current events pushed me away from everything American and so I thought it was about time.
I searched for something like 'lemmy getting started' and landed on this site:
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/01-getting-started.html
So the first greeting is a wall of text. After I read through it, I found myself here:
https://join-lemmy.org/instances
Now I got a bunch of options with no real way to evaluate what's what. I spent some time there looking through the options and didn't really know what to choose and what the impact would be. I used a search engine again to look for some opinions about the biggest ones which lead me nowhere, mostly.
So I kinda gave up and selected programming.dev because that's close enough to what I do professionally. I clicked on join and was presented with this
https://programming.dev/signup
So I don't know if that differs from instance to instance, but you need a moment to process this. The first few fields are obvious but then it starts to get a little weird. Instead of a checkbox or even implicit accepting of TOS and privacy policy (by registering here you agree to....) you have to take or copy paste that exact sentence into that answer box with a preview button(?) and then fill in the captcha. After that you are told that your registration needs to be approved manually and that there is no notification about that so you have to manually check from time to time whether your are able to login or not.
But it didn't end here. Because I found that the webui wasn't that great on mobile, I wanted an Android app. So I ended up here: https://join-lemmy.org/apps
And yet again was confronted with a bunch options I somehow had to evaluate. I'm still in the process finding an app I really like.
Now I know this is no rocket science, and having options is a good thing usually.
But still considering the average usually not tech savvy user, all of that is too much by quite a bit. That's overwhelming for the majority of people.
This whole thing needs to be a 10 second streamlined process. There should be one button to get you started. The instance selection site tells you: 'You can access all content in the lemmyverse from any server, so it doesn't matter which one you choose.'
So if that's the case, why bother the user with it? I admit I know jack shit about the fediverse, but if I were to design such a thing, I'd separate the IdP (identity provider) from the service/content providers. Have a couple of them redundantly, hosted by different parties so one entity can not shut down everything. Let the user register once, replicate that identity across the IdPs and let some interest selection wizard determine which content instances the use should be added to.
I know that's a big architecture change and will never happen. So maybe have that one obvious registration routine for a user and choose a first instance for the user based on interests or randomly (from a curated list to prevent users landing on some extreme instances) if the user can not be bothered to fill in their interests.
Have one default app which is good and recommended that. Let the app have sensible defaults (like the sorting thing), present most popular content first to hook the user.
Let the user look for alternatives later if they want to do that.
Don't let the user do all the homework upfront before they even know whether they even care and if it's worth the effort. Most people simply won't do it.
PS. Nope I do not know about 'Piefed'. I'll check it out later. It wasn't mentioned on all that sites that I looked at and that's part of the problem.
That's just my 2 cents.
Thanks for your feedback!
You landed on https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/01-getting-started.html to get started but you should have landed on https://join-lemmy.org/ which is a much simpler UI, i think. Somebody sent you the wrong link. I think, there should definitely be a more prominent link to the actual "sign up here" page.
That is indeed a good idea and i've never heard it formulated like this before, but i gotta think about it now.
That is definitely a big problem that should be changed; I'm not sure but maybe you should get an E-Mail after your registration is successful and maybe you should also be able to log in and use the account immediately (up to a limited extent) without waiting for manual confirmation.
This is wrong or outdated, Lemmy definitely sends an email once your registration is approved or denied (if you provided an email during registration). Worth contacting the programming.dev admins to change this line.
Piefed was made much later, and many of the Lemmy documentation sites simply haven't been updated.
The problem with join-lemmy is that they removed lemmy.world from their listings because they thought it was too prominent, and now it just randomises servers. Which is not a good idea. At the same time, I don't think a process in which everyone is bundled into lemmy.world is good. It just entrenches centralisation.
Here is the instance chooser that @Skavau@piefed.social mentioned.
There are a ton of features that PieFed has that Lemmy lacks. Like Reddit's, PieFed's "search" feature sucks ass (by design, as it is not the top priority right now), and Lemmy's btw is super fantastic, though you don't even need to have a user account to use Lemmy's search feature, and everything else is better on PieFed, often by a lot (but, some very few not as good though). PieFed even has features that Reddit itself lacks - which makes sense when you realize that all features that Reddit has pumped out in the past 10 years or so have been to increase their profit margins rather than offer any functionality that users themselves wanted.
PieFed is the future of the Threadiverse. Many instances have already or are currently in the process of switching over to it. At least give it a look? The sign-in process will surely convince you to stay, but if not then we'd all be interested to know your thoughts on what turned you away too?
Oh, one major caveat: most of PieFed's most advanced features (such as polls, user and post flairs, categories of communities, topic areas and user-customizable & shareable feeds, etc.) are not available yet from 3rd party apps, which having been designed for Lemmy originally they are still mainly restricted to the basic functionality that Lemmy offers. Even there, imho having to visit the PieFed website UI rarely to turn on an option that would affect daily/hourly interaction via a 3rd party app still makes PieFed more worthwhile compared to Lemmy that does not even offer those kinds of features at all - e.g. the ability to block all users from an instance.
Ah, no in this context I was referrng to the join-lemmy instance chooser that I think they joined through which removes lemmy.world (because of their idea that it's too big) and randomises the servers a new user automatically sees. You can change it to sort by most active but because lemmy.world is not there, lemmy.ml and hexbear are right at the top (and it won't mention that hexbear is widely defederated).
Thanks for the clarification. I thought at some point you were mentioning how the wall of text at https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/01-getting-started.html somehow never once mentions PieFed as an option, but I think that's excellent that you mentioned those additional details.
I agree. New user introduction is very poor. Took me ages just to choose an instance - and that was in no small part because I'm here not only to escape the enshittified chokepoint capitalism of american big tech, but also because I'm utterly sick of the domination of US centric points of view and censorship. Even though i know communities are not instance locked, I wanted an instance that is not likely to be managed in the same way. Time will tell if I chose well or poorly
Fwiw that's a very popular instance you are on, so I think you will likely enjoy it? But if not, then that is the beauty of the Fediverse: you can always hop over to some other one if you wanted.
Like email providers: if gmail doesn't suit you, then switch to another one, or even self-host your own if that sounds appealing:-P.
Note here there is zero advertising: none. Therefore, no incentive to try to "(ab)use" you as the product. Conversely, features offered to you are significantly slower to be developed (honestly PieFed is so very far ahead of Lemmy in that respect, e.g. offering keyword filters such as "Musk" or "Trump", and advanced AI slop detection, etc.). So instead of thinking how different platforms will fall over themselves trying to compete for your "business", think along the lines instead of how you can match up with other like-minded folks. And at some point you'll want to contribute - perhaps code development, or donations, though what the Threadiverse needs most is just participation, as in content posted to it, the more thoughtful the better.
So far you are off to a fantastic start, welcome! :-D
Thanks for the kind reply.
I am also new (coming from Reddit) and it was confusing that there was no register button anywhere.
There is a "Join" button which goes directly to the registration page of the respective instance. Would it be clearer to rename this? Other than that I'm also happy to make improvements if you have concrete suggestions.
Edit: Made a PR to rename Join to Sign Up: https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/pull/509
Well, I don't understand exactly how it works yet. My steps were to search in the Play Store for Lemmy, but there were multiple apps and all had different names. When I downloaded Boost now, there was not directly a register or sign up button. So it's probably an issue of Boost.
There is nothing preventing apps from providing a registration flow. For example Voyager has it. I suppose the problem is again which instance to choose for signup. You can discuss this in https://lemmy.world/c/boostforlemmy or https://lemmy.world/c/lemmyapps.
As for multiple Lemmy apps being available: Most of the current Lemmy users came here in 2023 when Reddit locked down the API and killed third-party apps. Thats why a lot of apps are now available, and everyone can decide for himself which one he prefers.
@dessalines@lemmy.ml for the love of god please fix the onboarding
Also go full Elon Mulk and artificially boost lemmy.sdf content they have a lot of good OC
I don't think he controls join.lemmy.org. Unless I am completely wrong.
I checked the contact section and it uses the .ml support account so maybe he does
That just might be where they set up for support questions.
That would mean that lemmy.ml chose to remove lemmy.world from there, which I would think would upset lemmy.world mods.
I believe they publicly stated they removed .world from it to prevent centralization because everyone was going to a single instance, thus defeating the fediverse purpose. But this is all from memory and I might be wrong
The logic it uses is to hide any instances with more than 30% of all active users to prevent centralization, just like you say. There are also some other filters like requiring at least 5 active users.
Yes, that's correct. But I'm not aware of lemmy.ml mods running it is all I mean. That it randomises the instances for newbies on first view isn't great either.
Funny enough, a lot of that ends up feeling similar with the move to Linux (and its many distros). It got a very good shift because of Microsoft voluntarily deciding "This OS will be horrible for everyone now." but Reddit hasn't had anything so egregious. Even Linux has a few issues with content/apps from not having enough contributors.
The onboarding being a bit difficult is a good thing IMO, it keeps the standards a bit higher and the Facebook boomers and TikTok children out. The internet was better when it wasn't so easily accessible.
The culture wars have reached the fediverse, and it's making me less happy to be here. I don't want to hang out in places where people use slurs and insults, even if they're not aimed at me. I'm seeing more casual misogyny/misandry, more casual use of the r** slur, more perfectionist gatekeeping, more assumptions, and just less good-faith comments in general.
I'd advertise, but I'm starting to look for an alternative to lemmy.
I'm starting to see this. Over on Mastodon I'm starting to get devisive pro-Reform stuff in my feed. Often it's someone boosting (though not sure why) a video from a pro-Farage account and making a silly comment about it. The local instance I'm in is nice and friendly - and I don't want the arrival of people who just want to stir up things. We do politics there and seems left-leaning but it's courteous. Occasionally a tone deaf elephant will thunder through and then move instances when they realise we don't like the being nasty stuff.
pretty much. i have been here for over two years. in the past few months it's become more and more frustrating and i'm getting harassed/attacked/banned, always from bad faith actors that whose grade school reasoning is 'i know you are but what am i?!' type justifications. they only reply to call you names and tell you how wrong you are and how right they are.
it's the same idiots who ruined reddit who can't tolerate anyone who thinks differently than them and then screech about how tolerate and open minded they are and if anyone disagrees with them the are a stupid facist bigot.
people forget, but redditque was a think people actaully practiced and made reddit a really cool place. people would argue, but they generally didn't ban/block/harass each other. nobody in first decade of reddit went around downvoting/reporting all my posts. but that's just how shit is now on the internet too many unwell nutjobs who want to punish people who type words they don't like.
I haven't seen any slurs in my feed, maybe jump instances?
i smell bots, and tankie infiltration into the rest of limit, since the triad is defederate, thier members are trying to branch out into other communities.
Stop, stop it for a second. "Tankie"? It's probably just people with different ideas than yours. If you don't like to read what they have to say, block them, but please stop calling collective demeaning names to artificial groups of people.
Tankies are the communists who scream and harass anyone who isn't communist like them, and think anyone who doesn't believe what they believe is fascist and should be eliminated.
I've been called a tankie several times only because my account is in lemmy.ml and I sympathyze with some communist ideas. Granted, these are some fundamental or radical ideas.
guilt by association is a hell of a drug.
but i'm not gonna lie, most of the crazy hostile comments I get are from .ml users or other far-left instance users. which makes sense. I'm not far-left, so in their eyes I am a Nazi and I should be violently suppressed for not believing what they believe.
I'm okay with your point of view. I can say the same about the lemmy.world instance. Maybe we belong to a third instance, but as long as lemmy.ml has me uncensored, I'm happy here.
I think part of the issue is new users not understanding or feeling comfortable with the fediverse (myself included a while ago). Even after searching for a bit and looking it up I can barely get how it works, but there's really no guide with the common terms anywhere, how to get started, the difference between platforms and what they have in common etc.
The benefits are the first thing you hear about, but they seem more like jargon terms than actually anything functional.
Reddit has better accessibility and user retainment, alongside with a library of old posts that are good for searching some niche stuff up.
For example, if I were to get a friend into lemmy, I'm not really sure how I can explain it to them, or where to start other than the copy paste "decentralized" "federated" stuff. It doesn't really answer stuff like who moderates it, develops it, owns it, or what's the difference between lemmy, piefed mbin, how do they interact with each other.
I believe that an introductory "oficial" post on the front of each platform in layman's terms would be great to get new users to stay.
Lemmy, Piefed and Mbin are all entirely different and unique attempts at creating a self-hostable software package for a reddit-like website. In the same way that Reddit was trying to be like Digg, but with it's own codebase starting from scratch.
Despite using different codebases, Lemmy, Piefed and Mbin are all compatible with each other, like if you could leave comments on reddit threads from your Digg account while on Digg.
The reason they can talk to each other is they were all built with one thing in common: at the core of them is something called the ActivityPub Protocol, which in simple terms means the way they send messages, make posts, etc, are all using one standard, so they can all understand each other, like speaking the same language. An upvote from lemmy is understood as an upvote by Piefed, same for comments, posts, etc.
A similar thing on the web that functions just like that is E-mail. No matter what email provider you use, you can send an email to any other email provider, and it all just works because at the core, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL mail, Proton Mail, etc, they all use the standardized E-mail Protocol.
Just like with email, where you can't log into a Gmail account from the Yahoo Mail log-in page, you also can't log into a lemmy account from a Piefed login page.
But if you're familiar with how you can use an E-Mail client, like Thunderbird or Outlook Express to log into almost any email account regardless of where it's hosted, so to with lemmy/piefed mobile apps, which only act as a front-end like Thunderbird.
Each lemmy/piefed instance is like it's own email provider (instance just means server, a server is a computer that hosts the software and makes it available on the internet for us to find). So lemmy.world is like Gmail, but piefed.social is an entirely different provider, equivalent to Yahoo mail. You could access either from a mobile app, which acts as a client, but if you went to them with a web browser, you'd have to go to lemmy.world directly if that's where your account was, similar to how you would have to for email.
All of these servers are 'federated' with each other, which basically means once they establish a connection, they will continually offer new data to each other automatically. So Lemmy.world will always send out to piefed.social any new posts, comments, or upvotes that occur on lemmy.world, as well as pass forward any posts, comments, or upvotes that any lemmy.world user makes on a community hosted on piefed.social.
Lemmy, Piefed, and Mbin are open-source, which means they are developed collaboratively online for anyone to see or participate in (if you're familiar with how Linux is developed, it is very similar to that).
As for who develops these softwares, you can see who has contributed to them on their respective development platforms.
But as for the instances themselves, they are owned by the individuals who run the physical servers that each instance runs on.
Thanks, if I get someone on this I'll link them this post, it's a good starting place.
Hopefully we can get something like this in the front page with a user guide (how to start, what are communities, FAQ, etc) so more people stay around!
Glad you found it helpful! Though for people new to this, depending on their tech savvyness, less info might be more.
An average user doesn't really need to know exactly how Lemmy/piefed work to actually use it effectively, and depending on how interested they are in learning how things work, the longer explanation I gave may be off-putting to some people, or make it seem too complex.
As an example; I'm not sure most people actually know how email works at all on a technical level, they just know that if they log into their Gmail and put the right address for the person they're trying to reach, everything works. They may not even understand that the @whatever.com part means their email is being sent to a totally different server (if it's not also Gmail) being hosted by different corporations somewhere else in the world, or how exactly an email is shuffled across all the different ISP's, cabling, repeaters, etc. Explaining the details of all those things would make email seem horribly complex and off-putting to many. Without any of the that knowledge, as long as they know just the steps to accomplish what they want, all is well.
With Lemmy or Piefed, an equivalent could be just sending them a link to a known reliable general instance (Piefed.social would be a good choice) and telling them to create an account there and to use it just like they would reddit. For the most part, that's all anyone really needs to know to have a pretty good experience. They may wonder why different users have different domain names at the end of their name, and if they ask you could explain further, but they'll still be able to navigate around, comment, find communities and all the rest without knowing, which should lessen the feeling that it's complicated.
just tell them it's like when people had their won websites.
except now they their own reddits.
but i guess if they are under 30 they may not understand what any of that means, since people haveing websites stopped being a thing 10+ years ago.
google also plays heavily into it, as they promote reddit searches in thier front page, this is usually what gets people hooked to reddit.
Here's my approach: over the holidays I suggested lemmy to 3 people I know. I did so by emailing or texting them links to the following piefed feeds of lemmy communities:
The first is non-political, non-tech, low-meme communities (tho sometimes those topics sneak in.) The second is non-political, non-tech meme/humor communities. One peson said they thought it was neat, the other said they bookmarked it, the third didn't say anything. Dunno if they joined.
oh wow! feeds are impressive! kinda like the feature i requested here
Yeah, feeds are neat bc they're user-curated, they're easy to copy, and you can easily tell which communities are active.
Your proximetry metrics is a good idea too, I bet it would work best in a tool like the Lemmy Explorer: https://lemmyverse.net/communities
yeah i get what you mean, but it would be neat if it was automated so it's personal to you, and just shows you new communities you might be interested in.
that site is odd... looks like we have to go to https://lemmyverse.net/ and THEN click "communities"...
Either we will have a huge spike in activity soon or Lemmy will become a ghostland. It is no wonder that we have low activity here with those numbers of users. But, on the other hand, Reddit has too much users + bots which leads to information overflow. Thus, Lemmy would be nice if it had only a few several hundred thousands of users.
There does seem to be a cyclical nature to new users. Same with new communities. I'll go looking for a niche community and find one, only to see a half dozen posts 2 years ago during the first big push to the fediverse, and then it's dead after that. It's entirely possible I'm looking at an entire ghost community where every one of those users bailed a couple years back.
I don't quite get it:
Lemmy has started in 2019 with 0 users and 0 instances. In 2023 there were still less than 100 instances... now the platform has oviously jumped to a few thousand instances and about 100 k users. To me this is the opposite of a ghostland.
If we consider that bigTech will mostly screw over their customers bowing to Trump I don't really get all the negativity around here.
I've joined two days ago and you know what? I'm actually willing to contribute by posting instead of lurking at reddit because if I create content it's not for somme multi million dollar corp to fill their pockets with revenue but for this community to thrive...
I my eyes this isn't the right time for doomerism... on the contrary.
I agree with you. I just say the possibilities based on statistics. I also like Lemmy more than Reddit. The only issue is that there are missing some specialized comunities like the one about Pyrotechnics(the only one existing on Lemmy is on the dead instance, thus having no activity), for example.
Jep, I think the lack of specialized communities is definetly a problem. However I think this is, in the last resort, mostly up to us as users. If we don't create content for topics we find interesting... who else could?
But I also get that possible reddit refugees who are used to lurk on content instead of creating it (I don't exclude myself here) will find the plattform(s) to empty to be satisfied.
Yeah, but for lurking on Reddit you don't even need an account. If only you are not NSFW enjoyer. :)
When it came to light to everyone that their Up/Down Votes are tracked and viewable by everyone, they basically stopped engaging.
Tell your musician friends to find me here:
https://lemmy.world/c/IndepthIndie
Actually, you know what? I'll give a free guitar lesson to the first 10 people to make a post in that group.
Aww man i would really like that guitar lessons! But i don't have enough knowledge/context to post in that community (yet) :P
Don't worry about it. Honestly. Just post a song and tell us what you like about it. That's good enough. Maybe later you can keep us updated on your guitar progress!
(Hmmm... I always suspected the "In-depth" in the group's name was maybe a little intimidating haha)
it was more a joke about the "free guitar lessons" - well, now i only need a guitar to begin :P
aw damn i'm a commenter more than a poster. I could use a good resource on theory beyond the circle of fifths though i'm a total novice.
I've used this one quite a bit: https://musictheory.pugetsound.edu/
thank you so much. i am going to fall so much asleep to this
I've always been more of a lurker/commenter than a poster, but posters are what Lemmy needs if we want more users to come. People need to want to come to Lemmy for content.
In my experience, the best poster on the platform is the person making the comics on /c/unix_surrealism, in that sometimes I find myself wanting to check the comm to see if there is anything new.
And this will be disagreed with heavily, but the second best posters are the memers at Hexbear. I just think they make the funniest leftist memes (so political content, sorry people who are tired of politics), and they're the only instance that actually has a site culture, with their own in-jokes and history/lore.
When Reddit was young, that was a big part of it: Posts that went viral among the community and became in-jokes/lore. Comment chains (as much as I grew to hate them). And original ideas for content (AMA, TIL, AITA, etc.). There was a kind of culture to the site (that's mostly been diluted now).
That said. I like Lemmy perfectly fine at the size it is, even if it doesn't fully replace Reddit. Though it's concerning to see it declining.
the startrek instance has the best culture IMO. Its just wholesome startrek posting and they always seem to dig up a relevant scene.
I THINK THE main poster that post regularly, was too whiney and somewhat annoying. the one that named himself after the STD characther.
Well, good news - I'm brand new and decided I'm not resubbing to Relay so I'm effectively off Reddit since the official mobile app is garbage.
Gods I fucking hate that app (and the way Reddit's mobile site tries to shove it down your throat). Welcome!
you know what would be really helpful? cross this with data from moderation. content removals, bans, permabans.
then, layer in mods/communities and you might find why users are leaving.
People probably leave because this plattorm isn't designed to be addictive, i take pretty significant breaks very regularly
I think it's more a lower intake of new users rather than an especially notable user attrition rate.
right?! fuck the mods
The more niche communities really suffer I feel from the decentralized pattern. Tv shows, movies, video games, etc. you have everyone trying to be the "de-facto" instance and none of them really get traffic.
Really, Lemmy is just a US political platform with some weak notions of being anything else. And if it wants to survive, it needs more people, with more interesting topic. To many subs are just ghost towns.
A big part of that is on the design side. We really need the ability to fork/ clone/ merge/ migrate communities across instances. Lemmy was designed to be an "entire" reddit replacement. Because of this, we end up with redundant communities with less activity. Migration of accounts and communities could effectively solve this issue.
Its possibly lemmy could have been designed such that communities of similar type could be aggregated into a single instance. For example, maybe you start a "snowboarding" community on .world, but when a sports focused instance pops up, you might want to migrate your community. A few instances build like this.
Piefed has a community migration tool.
Yeah. Huge improvement and my other account is on piefed.social
Not having it from the beginning though, it helped create this issue in declining usership, which will kill the entire project if we don't address it.
I've lived through the birth growth and death of many former spaces which occupy a similar role as Lemmy. When users start to depart, its almost always destined for catastrophic collapse.
Well, better late than never. Piefed can't solve the limitations that Lemmy had.
Agreed.
The politics here is also so hostile and violent, and one-sided. It's gross. Even moderate/chill points of view are mercilessly attacked and told the are awful bad people for not being extremists. Anyone who isn't on 'their side' is the 'enemy'.
I don't know the motives of others, but I've been spending increasingly less time on the internet and more time listening to podcasts & reading.
Lemmy attracts only certain types of people who like reading articles and replying long paragraphs arguing with each other or small details. In a time when literacy is falling, means there's
only a smaller and smaller pie left. Maybe we need a book club or pen pal system or a noobie hub to make it a friendlier environment. There's a cloud of hostility in the air friends, don't let it take you. Ape strong together.
And the obvious new use case of a centralized space to coordinate regime change has some daunting externalities that preclude it.
I agree! There is not enough people here
I'm here everyday, unfortunately I don't have a great deal to post only comment.
I'm very busy with real life work to create content
Comments are what we need the most!
My two cents is that more users oughta establish new communities when they find the absence of one. Even if they don't have the time to devote for fully moderating it, as people join the responsibilities can be allocated among the early adopters. Especially those with strong political and moral backgrounds (to mitigate abuses of power like those infamously cultivated at Reddit).
Do comments help also or we need to post topics etc.
I think comments are what Lemmy needs the most, we already have a good number of posts
Comments (quality ones) are the life of a community.
The hurdle of registration and getting into the Fediverse is, in my view, too high for many people.
I had to guide my brother step by step to get him into the Fediverse.
I think that’s where it often fails.
It needs to be much easier to join — then more people would probably come in.
https://piefed.social/auth/instance_chooser
Lemmy specifically needs UX improvements in signup. I've seen many Reddit users get stuck or confused when trying to signup for a Lemmy instance.
I think this should be a big focus of v1.1 (v1.0 is already a victim of scope creep and needs to get finished)
It's the porn. And comments like "those colors are really a bad choice, they make the graph very difficult to read".
But seriously, the quality content in Reddit is not the reason it's big. It's a corporate. It's a massive echo chamber destined to shame people under insufficiently explained contexts. I see it like a virtual mob with pitchforks on steroids (bots).
I love Lemmy, and would never ask for it to change. Call me crazy, but I have essentially zero problems with the content and comments posted (barring shit news sources). If I want to disengage from the misery of the world, I can read a book or play a game or make music or something. I suppose I've adapted over the years.
It is, in my opinion, unrealistic and unwarranted to expect the userbase to self-sensor, and it is ESPECIALLY unrealistic and against the ethos of the program to hand out bans for calls to action, as some users are suggesting in the comments here. Perhaps .world should launch a spinoff instance that can satisfy these criteria, I don't know. Passivity and complacency can be nice, but are altogether unproductive, in my mind. We need people to be frustrated, angry, and hungry.
Lemmy has also opened my eyes to the world of open source software, something I am tremendously thankful for.
I'm not satisfied with this comment, it feels sloppy, but I want to get my feelings out there!
o7
What do you think of a content filter setup when you register the account like this:
Effectively, when you click "no politics", it blocks the !News@lemmy.world, !politics@lemmy.world, !politicalmemes@lemmy.world, !pravda_news@news.abolish.capital communities and such.
What does it do when you select the middle option?
i don't know
Then start breeding yall
There's an xkcd for that.
- source, and explainer
I send my friends memes. They ask "Muad'dib, where do you get these great memes?" I say I get my great memes from Lemmy. They instantly lose interest, because Lemmy is full of tankies and kinphobes
Don't just say "Lemmy", you gotta send them to a specific instance, one that defederated certain instances
This is the central reason I choose not to engage with most posts. It's a toss up whether I'm talking to a rational human being or I happened to walk into the side of the antinatalist hyper accelerationist ML willing to die to defend the most obscure take about consent or something.
I would love a more healthy, less terminally online discourse on Lemmy.
Just ban the instances you don't like, don't succumb to FOMO
banning the instance doesn't ban the users coming into your instances.
Oh yeah, I believe that will be fixed in v1.0
I feel like we've been waiting on this one for a while now
100% agree. I tend to get my political comments downvoted a lot because I keep saying silly things like "capitalism and communism are both utopias that break due to human greed" or "anarchism won't solve the issue of people like Trump grabbing power".
Lots of weird people loving the power of magical words around here.
I mean the majority of campists and tankies on the fediverse are going to be from .ml.
You are also on .zip so you can also see lemmygrad and hexbear users.
My feed is making me so much happier, now that I do not have to waste time scrolling past content from all three on the triad.
Have you tried telling them inspiration comes from spice? Want some? First one's on me?
What's a kinphobe?
I was meaning to buy a bunch of sticker for all sort of cool stuff I support (lemmy/fedi being one of those things) and stick it around the city. Know its not much, but its fun! :)
can you please share the sticker design? :)
then others can use them too
let me cook. :)
will be posting it on here.
Isn't this not much better than graffiti? I think advocating for the fediverse is great, but let's not plaster unnecessary and potentially illegal posters/advertisements everywhere.
If you want to display an appreciation for the fediverse, perhaps there are T-shirts with the fediverse logo?
the difference between graffiti and stickers is that typically, you can remove stickers quite easily, while graffiti is a more difficult-to-remove thing. so there's not much damage done.
I mean, that's still acknowledging that damage is being done, just less than actual graffiti. I'd rather not associate the fediverse with defacing public spaces with half-scraped off stickers.
Again, feel like a t-shirt or a cap is a much better option.
ehh, there's spaces where adding stickers (that advocate for public-benefit, non-commercial stuff) is considered socially acceptable, such as in certain university buildings, pubs/bars, the back of your own laptop, ...
Alright alright, definitely in those contexts there is no problem, of course.
graffiti is cool though :(
found a lot of cool projects and organizations through stickers. i prefer it over a big bright televisions plastering the city trying to sell you unhealthy things.
I definitely do not find graffiti cool. It's illegal and antisocial behavior. The art can be cool of course (although it very rarely is in my experience), but the illegal act is not.
The "Workers over billionaires" sticker advocating for workers right, sits on the post of a grocery cart corral. I smile everytime I see it. I'm thankful for who ever stuck it there, and even cooler, it's not been scrubbed off after a full year.
You can cry rules/laws if you want, but where I am, the powers at large are not bound by any law, so why must I be bound to something so arbitrary? Why should we not advocate for ourselves in anyway possible?
Do you understand how hopeful it is to see graffiti/stickers in support of your values out in the wild? I was filled with hope when I first saw that sticker, for we are not alone
It feels really arrogant to call these acts antisocial behavior. It's not
There's also plenty of community boards around one could post a sticker to with a thumb tack, and it breaks no rule. It's free for use.
It might be because I am in Denmark which has quite a functioning and lawful system and where I see the most graffiti is in public transport, like on trains and train stations. The transport company spends a lot of money cleaning that graffiti, making public transport more expensive for everyone else (hence antisocial behavior).
So I can understand where you are coming from but my perspective is just different.
I am curious why there is such a big difference between FediDB and Fedi Observer.
FediDB has Lemmy at 48 K MAU:
https://fedidb.com/ (Lemmy is the fourth entry on the platform list).
Possibly different instances on fedidb.
Interestingly enough, the stats for Piefed are nearly identical for both sources, the Lemmy delta is huge though.
Well for one thing, "accounts" is nearly a meaningless number. Even Reddit finally acknowledged that and is starting to abolish them. I personally have had several accounts (kbin.earth, startrek.website, discuss.online), and some people here have roughly one account per instances - which since Lemmy has not federated moderation reports was basically essential (see e.g. this post).
This btw messes with the stats even for "active" accounts, by inflating them so that multiple accounts get counted even though representing fewer people.
Though in contrast, someone who made an account once 3 years ago, then left and never returned... this means next to nothing, making the https://fedidb.com website not nearly as useful for that purpose (instead it would track mainly "older" instances, except even there it does not work for that purpose, since e.g. lemm.ee is of course missing).
Also, I notice that hexbear.net is missing too, and I recall that at least one point it was one of the largest instances. Note that it is missing from both websites though, leaving both of them imprecise, yet it would seem not equally so.
I am talking about MAUs exclusively, not the number of accounts. MAUs of course don't account for users with multiple active accounts, but I would suspect that this class of user is a small minority.
Still not sure why there is such a big difference in MAUs between FediDB and Fedi Observer (Hexbear does not have 10K MAU).
https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/data/lemmy/users
Web banners are the way to go
Maybe we could join a webring
Like in the 1990s?
Hell yeah.
Maybe everyone should be a literal more willing to discuss things than just dog pile on with downvotes.
This place is mighty insufferable and I say that as one insufferable twat.
Lemmy copying Reddit with the downvotes system is something that really frustrates me.
The downvote button is one of the most toxic things about Reddit. Nobody uses it the way it is supposedly intended to be used.
Lemmy saw that and thought great, let's copy.
I don't know whether they did it because they wanted to make a straight up Reddit clone, or whether they mistakenly thought Lemmy users would be above that kind of behaviour (lol), but either way it was a mistake IMO. It just encourages division.
Yeah I treat the downvote as a way of saying shit content or trolling or whatever. People on here seem to treat it like a disagreement button.
If you’re not engaging to try and bring people to your point of view then what are you here for cause I’m not here for a circle jerk, I can wank myself off just fine. This place seems like a club no dissimilar to r/conservative but for “our side” and fuck that I’ll hold my people to the same standards as people I don’t agree with. Thats integrity.
I don't agree there. Not in most cases. Because upvoting and downvoting is public to instance admins and community mods (on comms they moderate) so if you downvote on disagreement a lot, you could find yourself banned from communities.
It's not the best system, but other alternatives are far more indepth. There does need to be a way to curate content on the site, to organise it organically. Lemmy's upvoting and downvoting is at least public, mitigating the worst aspects of Reddits system.
K/Mbin has a system where upvotes coincide with "Increases", and downvotes with "Reduces", separately from the algorithm. People just found it confusing though.
Emoji reactions may help a bit... except that Lemmy users don't even see those, much less use instead of voting. And if we added them to the sorting system, them we would just be speed-running exactly the process that Reddit went through.
Sorry I am not offering real solutions here just further discussion on the topic. Doesn't PieFed also allow voting to be restricted to subscribers within a community? I feel like that would help a TON at least for drive-by voting from All, although I thought PieFed already offers it, yet I do not know how many communities use it or not.
Yes, but that won't impact lemmy users.
So how does that work: Lemmy users can still vote, with only users of some other PieFed instance but who are not subscribed to a community being blocked? Or Lemmy users will see a different vote count that includes all whereas PieFed's vote counts will be the subset of only subscribers?
The latter seems perfectly fine to me.
Lemmy users could vote, but my assumption would be that their downvote simply would not federate out to other instances. Their downvote would be reflected in the local count on their instance.
For me I deleted my account a month ago after 2 years of lemmy. I forgot about this account and jerboa install, the only community sub is this one haha.
I figure I'll just say why I left, this place became a depressing shit hole.
The communities aren't niche enough because it's not big enough, so it's just a shit experience. I'm just going to look to old school forums again. Phpbb you must still be out there..
I figure I'll still keep this account in case I need to use it for something useful. One never knows when they'll get lost on the seas and need some directions.
when the other big instance shut down, it just got distilled to mostly politics, which /worlds only. i was enjoying the cinema/movies, tv show communities until it just mostly disappeared. some rare subs too.
There are still active cinema and TV show communities, the ones from lemm.ee mostly moved over to piefed.social.
Honestly fragmentation is what keeps people that I recommend Lemmy away from it. They are used to the UX/UI doing most of the heavy lifting along with the more politically charged posts being there, my coworker who loves self hosting and tinkering tried to join. But was put off with how much more political things are on Lemmy and some Fediverse instances are and how hostile they can be with certain opinions. But I taught them how to curate their feed for more things tailored to their passions. But they've been on and off since there's multiple versions the same community which feeds into the fragmentation issue. That is just a viewpoint from me, I'm still fairly new to the Fediverse and Lemmy. (Which I love how diverse it is and how passionate people are.)
PieFed improves on those issues. And eventually when Lemmy v1.0 is released that will help too
I definitely will look into FieFed, do you have any resources you can point me to? I want to learn as much as I can to help teach people about the Fediverse and help build a wider web of folks going on and sharing.
some features of PieFed: https://join.piefed.social/features/
https://piefed.social/auth/instance_chooser
i suspect hes been on tankie triad isntances, before i blocked the triad i found myself accidentally engaged to too many of thier posts.
It wasn't due to only one instance, but more so the way federation works. They got tired of seeing a few political posts when trying to explore what the federated feed has and I ended up doing some work to help them curate a personal feed and set up for things they enjoy the most.
I've helped them curate what they want to see. But since there are so many copies of communities that have varying levels of activity that's what also put them off of using it as a core platform.
PieFed helps solve that with categories of communities, and also by gathering together all comments across all cross-posts. Seriously, it's an enormous difference, check it out, e.g. on PieFed.social.
Thank you so much! I'll keep that in mind and I'll learn more to teach others about it!
Yeah according to people here it is a sin to:
1) vote right-wing, or
2) vote at all, or
3) not vote
And you will definitely get an ear-full if you talk about it. Also, same if you do not talk about it. Well, aktshually...
I've been here a few years now and I can say Lemmy's got issues. You can't come on here and have a good time anymore when all it's about is trump trump trump and Linux Linux Linux it gets old. I wanna escape from reality a bit sometimes and there's few areas to subscribe to that gives any joy anymore.
Yeah part of the issue here is that there are so few users that the more niche topics just don't get a lot of traction.
For example, I help mod the Washington Capitals hockey team community, but mostly it's just two of us talking. We recently decided to stop posting game day threads for every game, because there'd be one comment in them (usually me), if we were lucky - and we were the last NHL team community to end the game day threads; most stopped long ago. The overhead just wasn't worth the reward. We decided we'd focus more on the general Hockey community, hoping to build that out a bit.
(We didn't give up entirely - we posted a sticky thread that is for all games, and we'll make a top level comment for each game in there, asking people to respond to that comment for that game. If they don't, not a major issue. This way we still have the forum for the game discussions without having to worry about posting it every time.)
THIS is the way. Build up general communities first, then the niche ones will come later. Kudos! :-)
I think part (though not all) of the issue is discoverability. There's other communities where this isn't as prevalent, but a) they're not always easy to find, and b) for this as well as other reasons, they might not be super active (if people don't know it exists, who's posting?)
I get around the first bit by trawling All New once and a while. One feature I will say I liked on reddit was the random community function. But while I like that it's a smaller userbase here for some reasons, it does mean less diversity of interests.
I made one of those communities:
https://lemmy.world/c/IndepthIndie
PieFed offers a number of options to aid in discoverability - like Topics, Feeds (user-customizable and shareable), and combining together all replies from all cross-posts (at which point you can be like "oh hey, I didn't know that community also existed?! Subscribed!!").
Sorry for being salty, but I've given up on Lemmy ever catching up to have even remotely close to as many features as PieFed.
Anyway you are definitely correct, community discovery has huge flaws when using Lemmy (and it's about to get worse, where lemmy.ml gets veto power in showing communities to newly-created instances - it is easy enough to get around that by simply adding them manually, but that will increase the authoritarian control factor even more than it is now, further strengthening the ties between the Lemmy sourcecode and the Lemmy.ml instance, where already maintenance of the latter siphons off a great deal of funding away from efforts to develop the codebase further).
Same federation, same posts, same users. Different software doesn't mean anything else changes.
There are an absolute shit-ton of features that PieFed has that Lemmy lacks. To give just one example, PieFed offers "polls", which do not show up on Lemmy since the latter lacks the ability to properly receive them.
Even for the posts that do federate, many features cannot federate in Lemmy, since the latter lacks the entire concept of them - e.g. hashtags, user & post flairs, user labels, limitation of community voting to only subscribers, etc. To give an example there, if a Lemmy community wanted to see fewer posts about USA politics, a moderator only has one option: make a rule and ban users who try it. In contrast a PieFed community could make a community flair and have a much gentler rule that any post about USA politics must use that flair, so that users who did not want to see such could filter them out. PieFed also combines communities into cross-community topic areas, and combines all comments across all cross-posts (identical posts sent to different communities), with the ruleset of the one currently clicked on displayed at the bottom below a post, including the description and the entire set of rules that the mods are asking the members to follow (displayed on each and every single post). Therefore even the identical communities look different when on PieFed, with many enhanced features (caveat: 3rd party apps have not yet adapted to take advantage of most of these features).
https://join-lemmy.org/instances will send you to places like hexbear.net and lemmy.ml, whereas https://piefed.social/auth/instance_chooser literally never will.
Even federation works differently, allowing a hierarchy of level of "trustedness" beyond simply yes federate fully vs. no defederate entirely. Also PieFed instances more efficiently send out 25x less data per post, and new instances are significantly easier to install and maintain (see e.g. irl stories of https://jeena.net/lemmy-switch-to-piefed and https://slrpnk.net/post/29381524, and don't miss how in both stories there are long-standing issues/bugs that somehow never seem to get fixed...). Feel free to like or dislike whatever you choose but...
Different federation, different posts, slightly different users. Different software means everything is now up to be changed, especially as the software is written in a language that encourages more contributors, and the devs are also much more responsive to feedback.
- source: Nutomic, one of the primary Lemmy devs
Even the very model of interaction on PieFed profoundly differs from Lemmy: e.g. if I wanted to block political posts then I could unsubscribe from all (or most) of them, so that they do not pollute my Subscribed feed on the main page, yet they would all still then be just a click away in the News & Politics Topic Feed, meaning that I can literally both have my cake (no politics) and eat it too (have politics whenever I want). Everything is different here. Check it out if you do not believe me - e.g. your very own instance has a PieFed version.
Honestly I think this is a problem. I don't think the instance picker should be so opinionated that it blocks (legal) instances. I want extremist to be directed away from the normie and moderate instances. I prefer to clearly characterize instances and let people pick their own, while also providing opinion for people who don't care or lack understanding.
Although this is clearly a point of preference, and I can see why some people would prefer the opposite to possibly prevent the radicalization of a moderate.
The primary problem here is that because lemmy.world isn't visible, the instance picker when organised by activity determines lemmy.ml to be the most popular instance and then not far-off, hexbear. That's not good long-term if people are shepherded into those instances without really knowing their context.
I mean... (to be, what's the word, pedantic?:-P) hexbear.net still exists though? And it is their choice if they want to convert to PieFed rather than remain with Lemmy. I am 100% certain that lemmy.ml will never do so though:-D.
So fwiw I agree whole-heartedly with what you said, and that, imho, is what https://piefed.social/auth/instance_chooser provides? Any other new instance can make their own choice, and I like those GUI options much better. Like when I think of "lemmy.ml", the "Technology" aspect and the phrase "A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers" is nowhere close to the top few thoughts that spring into my mind. And hexbears aren't even leftist, only pretending to be such. But the "choose your own adventure" category, in opposition to "Newbie-friendly", I feel like MUCH better describes both lemmy.ml and hexbear, wouldn't you agree?
On a long enough timeline, every Lemmy thread eventually becomes one of the following:
ACAB
Trump bad
FOSS good
Reddit bad
Socialism (generally, via vanguard party) good
Tankies (i.e. #5) bad
Not that I disagree with most of the above, but we need some normies in here to balance things out, so invite them and don't demonize them. That's made trickier by Reddit banning people for talking about the Fediverse/Lemmy, so you have to be clever about it.
Do you subscribe to other communities?
I do. But every other comment is about how the thing this community is about sucks.
Lemmy really has a problem with "fun". Everything is bad and you need to be told about it.
What communities, out of interest? Piefed has a wider range of options for following comms.
c/nintendo@lemmy.world is quite notorious for this
My group is not political =3
Or about Linux
https://lemmy.world/c/IndepthIndie
And you can say "block anything related to that," but I don't want to stop hearing about it entirely. Just not the only topics.
And even on the few active subs that aren't Trump or Linux, there's a lot of commenters that can't shut up about Trump or Linux, particularly ones that think you're a bad person if you ever stop talking about Trump.
Im new here and the part you talk about feels the same as reddit at least here I feel like im not supporting that clusterfuck by being an advertisement target.
Yeah even reddit is fucked these days.
By the way note there is not always an easy way to find communities naturally so I would recommend thinking of some key words and searching for communities with them to fill in some niches
I just got on to lemmy and im already over all the political news in here.
amen. i want to nerd out and make jokes and listen to people's stories and gain insightful from other people.
but now i have weirdos going into my history from such threads and telling me that if i think there is any subtlely to social or personal or moral issues, than I'm evil incarnate.
Well, if you leave there will be one less person who would post something that's neither Linux nor Trump. Be the change you want to see in the world. Stay out of spite, invite more people like you over, post whatever you want, and shove them into Linux posters' faces!
If you ask me, users kind of suck.
I know I do
Me too! (or is that three? 🤪)
I think I interact with Lemmy less now because I noticed that I grew tired of reading useless comments and for finding and reading articles I want to read I have RSS which doesn't bombard me with stuff I don't care about.
The presence of comments leads me to only want to read the comments and I hate that.
Why don't you share here some of those nice articles?
You know, I've never really gotten into RSS. I remember it being a huge deal a very long time ago, now I only see a niche few talk about it.
I'm still not sure I fully understand what RSS even is.
I'm doing my part. I can't stop making communities and having debates.
I'll do my best! Luckily, Lemmy still has a healthy community though
This, It is just big enough to be useful and reach specific niches. We do not need to be a massive giant monolith which will get flooded with corporate trolls, russian/israeli troll farms, undisclosed sponsored content...
Let just have a small wacko community in peace
Our numbers might be small just because we are humans who care about, well, human interaction lol. So it's not us to be unpopular, but big corpos to be overinflated by bots and shit
Thank you for your observation ✌️
Growth for growth sake is one of the most toxic concepts in modern society.
Hey Bro i think you forgot to wear this 👑👑👑👑
noooo, I didn't want to lose my head in the guillotine,
I do have the idea of making an app it makes an account for one instance and uses that "log in with Google/apple id". Then people can learn later that you you can join other instances or log in via web browser.
The server can be simple lemmy or mastodon server and the app can just be variant of Voyager or mastodon app. Someone need to get rid of copyright material then hard code an instance.
I would do it myself but I can't get an AI to code apps
The other option is to have an app that browser based
Would the default instance be run by the app dev? Or in collaboration with some instance? It would maybe be risky to do with an unaffiliated instance because if they didn't like it they could disallow these types of accounts or signups.
App dev can be outsource, but it really doesn't matter who run the hard coded instance. It could by. Sh.itjust.works. it would be an issue if the app took off and the instance wasn't ready for the influx.
Maybe it picks an instance at random to distribute the load.
My original idea in my head was that the app developer would run the instance that was hard coded
Piefed.ca would be a great candidate, they have a nonprofit foundation or something dedicated to this kind of stuff
Ask the app devs. They know how to easily set a default. There can still be an option to change the account and server deep down in a menu.
Their win is that if that modified app becomes popular it essentially still is their app and they will attract new developers and support.
I'll make a post on c/ fediverse and open source to generate ideas of how to do this this
What is that spike in activity in December, I wonder? I see a similar increase in December of 2024 as well, although there it remained sustained instead of dropping.
I hate that it's true but the people on the Threadiverse are toxic as fuck. I have almost universally always regretted making posts here, so I primarily stick to comments.
This in turn is due to the fact that the moderation tools suck ass - I hope PieFed will offer some strong hope for that, but as it is only a small percentage of the Threadiverse uses it.
PieFed also offers some hopes in other ways too - e.g. highly contentious users (who let's say receive 10x more downvotes than upvotes) have labels attached to their username. It doesn't block any content, but it helps new users from other platforms realize what they are getting into, if e.g. they engage with a known sea-lion.
And PieFed helps in so many other ways besides - e.g. a recent addition will automatically convert URLs pointing to other instances into one that will work on your home instance, where you are currently logged in and so can vote, reply, bookmark, or whatever. Lemmy will probably never add all the various features that PieFed even already offers - like post and user flairs, polls, combining comments across all cross-posts, and things like that that even Reddit does not offer. I don't mean to be annoying about all this but I said it to help illustrate: look at all that PieFed offers, and yet how many people remain on Lemmy? Now you understand a tiny bit better why someone remains on Reddit.
Plus Reddit is where the content is, and the user base too, so why would content creators want to post their stuff here, only to get trolled in the comment section? The Left always eats its own - and it rejects even more all the centrists and even ring-wingers, i.e. mainstream non-technical normie users i.e. the vast majority of content creators, who don't like to visit a Nazi bar (even a leftist tankie flavored one) and be told how they didn't vote properly or hard enough.
You said it yourself: you were one of those very people who did not want others to come. What could you possibly have said to your past self to have changed your mind earlier?
banning purges from reddit? i notice the dip and spikes coincides with purges from reddit, and election/controversial news elsewhere. because when something big happens its usually on multiple posts on the front page on reddit, and it takes a while to reach lemmy with the same news.
That makes sense. Btw r/all is in the process of being killed off, affecting some but not all users yet. So maybe hearing that news is what helped some people check us out. It did not seem to quite "take" though, given how the spike went right back down to the normal levels.
That is perhaps the most troubling take-away message from this graph: it is not simply people who do not give us a try who do not like us, it is most especially those who do bother to go through all the steps to make an account and do at least one action (even if that is simply a vote), but then who leave after a single month?
If so that would have devastating implications for the future of the Threadiverse - though fortunately it is far too soon to tell, since it is at least possible that some of that could be due to holiday travel.
Networks are almost always about quantity over quality.
But there's also the cost of having to switch to consider. If e.g. making an account were difficult, then is the quality still worthwhile in that case?
No. It's not. That would be hyper destructive to any chances the fediverse has of surviving.
I did not make this up, nor do I think that the sign-up procedure is inherently difficult. But this is something cited by many people over in the bad place, e.g. in r/RedditAlternatives. So it seems relevant to the OP, asking for more users, to cite why they claim that they do not want to come here. Yes the cost may be low, but there still is a cost.
And here I presumed that you meant "signing up", but if we meant to fully switch... yes that is actually super destructive to the Threadiverse in particular, but also is precisely what happens, on all of Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, and nodeBB too I would presume.
I'm just going to restart my point for clarity.
Any barriers to bringing on users into the fediverse at any level is destructive to the future survival of the fediverse. This is specifically an issue that came up during any of the waves of migration we see from the bad place.
At various times there have been bans, both temp and outright, for all kinds of reasons, for both agreeable and disagreeable reasons, but regardless the impact is destructive to the fediverse.
Social networks thrive on users and through scaling aquire different properties. It's more about the math of what it takes to keep a stable network and there is no getting around that. The "come one come all" approach things like the bad place use allows them to capture that kind of growth and without it, it's just not possible to have the kind of detailed and varied and populated network you would get otherwise.
There have been specific moderation choices that have significantly curtailed and hurt the growth of the fediverse on all sides. Defederation is a huge one. Overly dogmatic moderation is another.
Like I agree that I don't want tankies content or their spam, but realistically the "tankie"-verse versus the rest-of-us-verse has crippled the projects growth.
If you want maximum federation in your instance, lemmy.zip exists.
It's got nothing whatsoever to do with what I want.
It only has to do with the math of how large networked systems function.
Right now the fediverse is unstable and unsustainable. balkanization is a huge contributing factor.
It's not a preference thing. If you want the fediverse to survive we all need it to be bigger and balkanization prohibits that
HARD disagree.
First, it's the actual reason cited by many people, over in r/RedditAlternatives, as the reason that they left. They did not inquire as what place they might go to that has more tankies - they wanted exclusively fewer.
Second, lemm.ee tried to federate with everyone, and look how that turned out? Literally nobody word-wide was willing to step up and put up with all the crap slung at them on a literally daily basis, so the entire instance was shuttered. Hexbear likewise almost died off, as they pissed off their admins and then one forgot to keep the domain license renewed, plus remember that time that one of their admins was caught literally lying to other instance admins? There is zero possibility of calling that instance one that "engages in good faith".
Third, the developers of Lemmy for years lied to us and told us that the ability to block all the users on an instance would be coming - but then when they delivered it, we found out that users blocked in that manner could still read, vote on, and respond to you, even send you a DM, and then a subsequent release of Lemmy weakened those walls even further by adding the ability for blocked users to trigger notifications to your account. Why should incels collectively have more "rights" than the people who do not want to have to put up with them? You can say that I am a bad person on the internet because I do not enjoy walking into a Nazi bar... and you can say that about all of the other people that took one look at Lemmy and noped right back out to Reddit, but whatever you call us, your rights end where ours begin. And you cannot force those people who left here to come back, and offer us content. That's just not how people work.
Fourth, tankies are calling for the literal murder of people in and the actual downfall of Western civilization. I feel like it is perfectly understandable then that people who live in Western civilization might not feel entirely at home and welcomed here?
Many of us only came to the Threadiverse because of Kbin, not Lemmy. And now many of us remain only because of PieFed, not Lemmy. Tankies are causing people to shy away from Lemmy, not the anti-tankies who want to expand it to make even more people feel welcomed, by e.g. making dealing with them be opt-in rather than something that takes thousands and thousands and thousands of clicks as you have to block people one by singular one. Your rights to freedom of speech and by extension to let them have the same should not allowed to trump my own rights to not have to listen, unless I explicitly want to. They are free to speak, but why should an instance be forced to platform them and spread their message further, without the ability to withdraw consent? Defederation should only ever be used as a last resort... and against echo chamber instances not operating in good faith, it's a great tool to carve out safe spaces on the Threadiverse where people can not have to listen to their disingenuous edge-lord crap. Thank you for listening - I hope I have offered something interesting to think about - and have a good day.
The math that underpins large networked systems isn't something you can disagree with. Smaller in those kinds of systems are always less sustainable. Instance level moderation choices like defederation have directly contributed to the balkanization (you can agree or disagree with if it's a good thing to do so; the preference make no difference) of the Lemmy chunk of the fediverse.
Smaller, less networked systems are more unstable and less sustainable. Period.
The source data shows that while active users are down, the number of posts and comments are near all-time highs. While you need new users to help counteract churn, I think the higher post/comments count points to what I think a lot of people feel here: that quality seems to keep getting better and better.
Regarding how to bring more people in, I personally like how different lemmy servers have slightly different characteristics but each seems to appeal to larger groups. I see a future where there’s probably a small-ish number of large servers that cover broad groups of people.
It doesn't. It's the same people who keep posting the same lame memes as always.
its also if its new posts, and not just post regurgitated again from reddit. some of the posts here that are new has been on reddit for a while already.
It's the same 10 people repeating the same shit-tier political takes that make /pol/ users look like intellectuals.
That's NOT a good thing.
The only way non tech users who comprises of 90% of the world will join Lemmy only if they have one instance which is baked in the app.
People don't understand and don't want to learn what instances are, how it works etc. Non tech users don't give a shit. All they need is an app with username and password which hopefully the remember.
Once you get an app like that and the UI is reddit like , then 100% will move.
People over-react because it's new to them, but it's not really that complicated. It's not like email never caught on because it's federated.
90% dont care or want to learn tech but need fancy gadgets. Basically they need a screen and apps on a device which has been marketed successfully.
I think it's really overstated how tech savvy you have to be. I don't do anything highly technical here. I signed up to a server, searched for things I was interested in, and subscribed to communities with the stuff I liked. I vote, comment, and post. There are great apps on the mainstream app stores. Yes, more than one thing is inherently a bit more complicated than one thing. But, lest we forget, one is also the loneliest number.
We should really be telling people how easy this shit is.
There's a reason nobody uses it because people like you are in every corner of Lemmy.
Put it this way, if everybodys brain worked the same way then you'll be a billionaire like Donald J trump or elon musk.
There's a reason you're slaving a 9-5 and trying to push Lemmy to get a purpose in life.
How do you know what they do?
Is there anything wrong with trying to promote Lemmy to begin with?
Mate prolly all 9-5 slaves here. I have studied 9-5 aka middle and poor class behaviour for 15-20 years and I know when they start pushing something because they need a purpose in life like they have achieved something. Nothing wrong with that , every poor and middle class should have a purpose to exist.
No doubt, if the goal was to be some rich, worthless scumfuck I'd be doing different things. I'd probably have to spend my days trying to suck Trump Coins out of some grifter's dick. Or maybe I'd build a time machine to go back and make sure I popped out of a lady with a connection to an emerald mine. But... we all have our paths to walk. Mine is to toil endlessly in pursuit of purpose...
This conversation is actually a great example of complexity not mattering. You're on an Australian server, I'm on a Canadian server. We're replying to a post from a user on a third server to a community on a fourth server that people mistakenly think is American but is actually hosted in Germany. None of that matters because it just works. It's indistinguishable from posts and comments -- including you trying blame the whole thing on me -- at the same place. You can make it seem very complicated but all anyone has to do is type words in the little box and press the button to post it.
The way too many people think about the Fediverse right now is like thinking that you need to know every minor detail about how a call could make it from a cell phone in Australia to a cell phone in Canada. You don't need to know that to make a call. You don't need to know all the minutia about ActivityPub or federation to use the fediverse.
If you want to play Minecraft with friends, you need to find a server. Still the most popular game in the world.
Gamers are a bit more tech savvy than average people tho
Stfu nerd
The other option is that anybody who recommends Lemmy, actually just recommends an instance. Make an account on examplelemmyserver.org and download the app XYZ should be the go-to recommendation. Not ”there are so many cool options”.
I don't have the data to refute this but it just seems nuts to me.
Surely there are apps that allow signups from the app itself and suggest a default instance.
Voyager does, it uses Lemmy.zip by default
I agree completely, and I think this was shown definitively shown by Mastodon/Bluesky during the Twitter exodus.
While there is definitely something to be said for gradually assimilating new users into the customs of the network (I really like that Mastodon on the whole is a very respectful and inclusive space, with care paid to content warnings, alt text etc), on balance I would much rather have everyone on the fediverse - even if they brought all their Twitter-isms and Reddit-isms with them - but with strong moderation tools and protective spaces for those who want it. Then, we can win people over to those customs separately.
Many of the same apps that used to work on Reddit now work here on Lemmy, and some of the Lemmy apps now also work with PieFed.
Agreed on the sign-up but I think that too was mainly taken care of, back when lemmy.world was the default and over on Reddit people were sent direct links to the likes of e.g. feddit.org and discuss.online.
But there's barely any content here, especially outside of leftist politics and GNU/Linux, and the people are quite toxic. The issues may be insurmountable though I am placing my hopes into PieFed, getting away from the tankie issue and also offering significantly better moderation tools.
We used to have a thriving Star Trek instance before that one guy made that one post
Which post?
A cisgender repost farmer made a post accusing the admins of being transphobic with absolutely zero evidence, and got the other repost farmers to move with him to a community on lemmy.world. He and his friends are now some of Lemmy's biggest power mods, with influence across dozens of popular communities. The Star Trek instance had discussion forums, lore, news, and casual conversation about Trek in addition to memes. Now people only use the .world and dbzero meme communities.
Tbf, that's not why the only or even I would guess primarily the reason why the startrek.website instance is used less. That was my first instance hop after Kbin.Earth died off (with that whole Ernst fiasco), and I abandonded it due to the very MANY technical glitches - like I remember making a post a couple times that did not make its way over to Lemmy.World for like a week, by which time of course nobody saw it, since even though it was "new" (to them) the time had gotten back-dated to its original, so it looked and acted like it had simply been passed over and ignored by the community previously, at which point it simply continued to be so forever.
Also seveal times I would write a comment but if I spent >1 minute doing so, then it would not let me post - though neither would it deny my post either, instead simply spinning forever trying but never succeeded, my only recourse being to copy and paste it into another window to try again, and hope to avoid duplicates. Sometimes even voting was problematic, requiring MANY presses and also waiting between each to see if it "took" because of the network issues.
Please note that most non-Lemmy.World instances were having those kinds of problems at the time, one of the multiple reasons being due to how Lemmy would send each individual item on its own (a vote, a comment, a post) rather than bundled together in packets of information, causing especially instances that are geographically far from Lemmy.World to struggle severely and be behind for weeks to MONTHS (aussie.zone was hit particularly hard). So I do not blame the instance admins for that, although the problem was more severe on STW, so I created what at first was an alt to use during the the times that STW was most problematic, but since Discuss.Online had such fantastic uptime, just started using it permanently.
Also I don't know if you are talking about Stamets or FlyingSquid or whoever, but I will note that the Tenforward community is now even more fragmented before, with a version now on Piefed.world (it is the #2 community located there), where ironically they decided NOT to put a link back to tenforward@lemmy.world (e.g. as a Sister community), plus they still call the new one by the same name, making it at least LOOK like they want it to become the new default?
Anyway PieFed has the ability to fight against such fragmentation effects by joining together all related communities into a single conjoined multi-community ("Topics" are made by admins and the "Feed" versions are user-customizeable and shareable!), see e.g. https://piefed.social/topic/tv-movies/star-trek that puts Risa, Tenforward, Daystrom Institute, and Star Trek all together.
Startrek.website was never primarily local traffic. It used to be mostly lemmy.world users posting Star Trek content to the Star Trek communities, a lot like dullsters.net, but less extreme.
The off-instance users mostly stopped posting there and moved to Ten Forward, because of that clique's post.
Sounds like Section 31 to me.
Is that the original instance? https://startrek.website/
I think we have to think more about network effects and be willing to move away further from copying Reddit. Otherwise we end up with the same powermod problems. Reddit has used Subreddits to split a massive crowd. We don't have such a big crowd so there could be better ways to organise our posts.
This. Normal people can barely remember a domain name unless it’s also the name of the brand. So this platform is filtering for tech enthusiasts which leaves us with the same two-dimensional profile as every other platform.
To the user mines!
I actually don't mind a smaller community of more intelligent people. Too much riff raff and the quality degrades.
I respectfully disagree with your opinion, there is not enough people here
: (
Edit Actually after taking a step back and looking at how many thoughtful comments and conversations have happened on this thread, I am heartened.
There is a lot of passion here, we are just fighting against unbelievably strong currents.
The text in the graph needs better contrast. I can't read that shit
source
I think it is kind of a mistake that Lemmy tries to replicate or replace Reddit. If you want your "niche" content (which I can never figure out what people mean but this but I digress), it requires the network effect of Reddit. Reddit still exists and both Lemmy instances and Reddit are websites. You can easily have two tabs or like both apps on your phone so I'm not sure why it has to be all or nothing.
I think a better use of Lemmy is to provide things that don't work and don't exist on Reddit. A good example is https://crazypeople.online/c/eternalplaylist where we post whatever we're listening to and then sometimes comment on what other people are rocking at the time. I started https://crazypeople.online/c/streamingmovies just to post whatever bullshit I'm watching, maybe if you stream something from https://fmhy.net/ post it and we can all watch it.
I think the people using lemmy as a personal blog are more like what the platform excels at like https://lemmygrad.ml/c/spacedogschronicles and https://crazypeople.online/c/bitofarambler which became https://crazypeople.online/c/travel
Lastly I think the real win for Lemmy as a whole would be to figure out how to better interact with other fedi software. Maybe turning mastodon and pixelfed tags into communities and figuring out how to better integrate there would provide more and interesting content but in a scenario i find much easier to follow than subscribe to poster type twitter style microblogging.
TL;DR being Reddit 2 won't ever happen until Lemmy has a reason to exist that isn't being Reddit. Some people are building that and this is still early in the game.
yeah, i've been thinking about the same thing. how to properly embed mastodon content into Lemmy? Maybe one community for each poster? Is that the right approach?
Or should one Mastodon hashtag turn into one Lemmy community?
Interestingly each community shows up kind of like a user in Mastodon.
I think hashtags should be communities but I can see from an ActivityPub POV that would be difficult to dynamically create. Worth while though.
It also makes sense that a mastodon user should kind of look like a community or a maybe user in Lemmy but I personally don't like following people and much rather follow topics.
Maybe there's only underlying posts and users to the fediverse, and the difference between Lemmy and Mastodon is mostly how they're organized and presented in the feed
This is something I think whatever lemmy 2.0 is going to be really needs to focus on.
Just be a content aggregator for ALL of the fediverse. Everything. One feed.
Or maybe more clever ways of integrating. But right now, we're still relying on video mostly from YT (not peertube) and screenshots of things happening on mastodon. We need more connective tissue.
yeah i think to meaningfully embed peertube, we'd probably have to copy the peertube video player into the Lemmy frontend/app.
How about bridging over to bluesky? If they could follow and comment threads, the userbase explodes 10-fold (compared to the current exposure to mastodon).
See this thread: https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/issues/372
Wow that could be huge for us! I subscribed to that issue, eagerly awaiting the day that's enabled
Well, having an illustrated web page where it is simply explained how mastodon users can use lemmy as the equivalent of facebook groups would also give us pretty good exposure. Most mastodon users don't know the difference between mastodon and the fediverse.
i think the main issue is that bluesky/mastodon are user-centric (like Twitter) while Lemmy is content-centric (like Reddit) i wrote about this here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/52567886
Sure, these are two very different usability paradigms, but I think they are very well integrated by treating both groups and users on Lemmy as users on Mastodon. Mastodon and Lemmy are the vanilla examples, but a.gup.pe and mbin in show that the two coexist quite smoothly. It is "only" a question of how to map this onto BridgyFed.
Look, this is my filter list:
Because i don't want to deal with depressing politics every day in my off time.
And this is what i still see:
Maybe a tagging system would help?
Piefed has built in keyword filters for posts. You can move to piefed.zip if you want more options here.
Thanks. But that's one instance. I think this needs a lemmyverse implementation.
Piefed isn't an instance, it's an alternative software that reads Lemmy.
Piefed.social is the flagship instance, comparable to lemmy.ml.
Lemmy.zip made their own Piefed.
...then how does this fix anything? Same federation, same downward trend of losing users?
You're right, on piefed, the loss of users looks prettier.
The data in the OP doesn't include Piefed instances, it only measures Lemmy.
But no, it doesn't solve it - I was just suggesting to try out Piefed for people expressing frustration with Lemmys design limitations.
comparable in status, or in opinions?
status. part of the impetus of the development of piefed was a frustration with how the lemmy devs treated people who tried to get onboarded to help with the development of lemmy. i can go into more depth about how this is a reflection of how the lemmy devs see the world, but i don't necessarily feel like hashing all that out when i have bigger fascists to fry
Piefed seems to have its own share of issues, not using ActivityPub protocols which play nice with the rest of the Fediverse (Lemmy, Mastodon etc) for new features and instead prioritizing on their own platform and seeing the Fediverse as a secondary thing.
Status.
Piefed.social is the flagship in the sense that it's the instance run by the devs. They aren't tankies.
PieFed has added a feature where when people post AI slop that moderators can forcibly apply a label to it. Just like NSFW, it's fine to exist, so long as is labelled properly - so that e.g. you who does not want it can filter it out. Oh, PieFed also distinguishes between NSFW vs. NSFL, allowing separate options for display of each (hide completely, blur thumbnail, show as semi-transparent, or no alternations).
And another feature helps moderators detect whether a picture is AI vs. OC, and whether the content or even the user account itself may be a Chatbot. Again, PieFed welcomes bots... so long as they are properly labelled, with mods having tools to help label them when they refuse to by themselves.
PieFed also offers so many different options in-between content to simply "exist" vs. "not exist". Like one option makes bot posts shown as semi-transparent (or of course you can hide/show them all). Keywords likewise have an additional option besides filter "all" vs. filter "none", with filter "some", in situations where that can be helpful (not political, I get you there!:-P). Not only posts but user accounts can also have a label placed next to their username, so that you can see content but also upon seeing that visual indicator, know that any response you make to them will never be read. You as an end-user can place your own labels, or some label types are automatically placed by the software. You have lots of control to e.g. hide all comment replies exceeding a downvote threshold, or instead of hiding it completely you can auto-collapse it, making you take an extra step to expand it before reading (both of those I have turned off but it's there for you if you want).
Oh, PieFed also has literal hashtags too. Lemmy has fallen far behind what PieFed offers, in most respects.
Every person that keeps saying it's good that there is no one here sounds like scrooge in my head going,
"Good, all to decrease the surplus population"
Recommended this space for my friends after being a fan of the old reddit
o7
I completely agree. To attract more users, you not only have to create higher quality content, but also content that elicits an emotional response from users, as they well know at Reddit.
On Reddit, it is bots that are constantly posting controversial topics. On Lemmy, fortunately, it is humans who can participate in more controversial discussions to attract more humans. For me, as a Linux and Firefox user, controversial discussions include comparisons between Windows vs Linux, Firefox vs Chrome, etc.
The process through which we get more users is that something material changes in current Tirefire user's life that puts them over the threshold needed to look for alternative. Then they look. Lemmy is the obvious Reddit alternative, it's well indexed in search engines. Then they try it. If the quality of content is decent, there's a decent chance they stay. They know the quantity won't be as high, that's the major reason they haven't switched to begin with. So for this process to keep functioning, we need to maintain the quality.
Of course we should also suggest Lemmy, but probably when asked or otherwise appropriate. Or else it may have the opposite effect that naked shilling often has.
I advertised Lemmy to my friends a few times and they have now stopped replying to my messages :P
I just keep sending them memes I know they'll like. I've had 3 friends joing various instances so far, because after a while they just go:
Man....where do you get these memes?!
Not memes but I keep the address bar in the screen shot.
Fair play, whatever works is what's best
Ah well, I am not good at that.
The best I have gotten people to say is how I "know so much" about stuff at work and the best I can point them to is Wikipedia, StackOverflow and the like, which of course they aren't really interested in doing and their lines are probably just a way to try and flatter me.
At least they're flattering you 💪
Honestly, it is not fun being flattered in a way that makes me try to give them an answer that they will ignore.
Imagine a C++ compiler with feelings, reading your code ignoring the return value of a
[[nodiscard]]function.Ooft... yeah, fair enough. I don't get the joke, but I got the sentiment.
Same. It greatly did not help that Google searching for "Lemmy" used to go straight to lemmy.ml (as the first hit to a specific instance, after the stuff about the singer), which if you take a look at without an account you will see shows "Local" rather than "All" posts.
Just imagine: you sent a Westerner to a place that routinely and literally calls for the actual murder and downfall of all of Western society, with such posts peaking just before any election in a Western nation. YOU might block those types of posts, but I am explaining what the people that you mentioned Lemmy to almost surely saw? (although immediately after the USA election I started noticing a shift away from it being more confined to just the triad and instead spread more throughout the entire Threadiverse - MANY people now routinely call for the guillotine, with ever-decreasing ratio of joking to serious, and remember that can be shocking to mainstream people?)
Yeah.
Although I usually tend to send a link directly to the post (which is relevant to what is being discussed), the things around that might change their impression. And considering that their is more political stuff than plain tech stuff, almost everywhere on the internet rn, that kind of a result is expected.
Oh yeah, I concede that there are great discussions there, including some that are nowhere else (more or less, as in with much lower intensity). Certain communities are fine (in terms of their content), and direct links are just flat good scholarship to cite your resources.
That said, the wording of both of our messages here would also, in theory, apply to Reddit, X, Facebook, and even Truth Social, so it makes sense why we are being downvoted, bc the arguments going against moral purity testing are heavily unpopular here. And to some degree rightly so, since we need to separate ourselves as much as possible from such.
You might consider sending people links to those messages as accessible via programming.dev rather than lemmy.ml? Perhaps that approach would have more success at enticing people to join the Threadiverse who absolutely would not if you sent them a link to lemmy.ml and then they explored around that instance a bit and, not liking what they see there (understandably) nope right out of the whole affair.
People are not as simple as (most) programming - there is such variety and the less deep thinkers, who nonetheless have great skills in other areas that you lack (e.g. artists, or woodworking) may need you to do some of that more detailed thinking for them. If you want to - i.e. if you want the benefits that having done so would offer.
A) "Lemmy" is an embarrassingly bad name.
B) Most of the content I see on here seems to be shitposts. Not saying it all is, but the immediate impression for new users is terrible.
C) Lemmy's biggest strength is also its biggest weakness. Moderation is near non-existent and the comment section of posts always devolves into shit.
C) Moderation varies wildly based on the instance, and the community. I wouldn't say Lemmy comment sections are any worse than Reddits though.
Most people on Reddit avoid the larger subs like the plague though - but then when they come here, they don't know what to avoid or even to pay attention to, e.g. is !Chapotraphouse@hexbear.net a lively and fun, exciting place, or a toxic cesspit hellhole?
And at least that one is honest about what it is, whereas lemmy.ml markets itself as a community dedicated to discussing FOSS! (Which, among other things, yes is one of the variety of things discussed there, although somehow that description seems to be missing a fair bit of information that would have REALLY helped out a ton in educating people what communities to participate in).
This doesn't really seem to make sense to me.
funything i havnt have that much of interaction with the .ml tankie as much as hexbear, hexbear seemed to be mroe prominent, before i blocked the triad.
i think you got it reversed, people go to reddit to engage in the massive subreddits. ask, politics, videos, fauxmoi,,,,etc are all heavy traffic for the site.
i suspect alot of users who arnt banned on reddit, are waffling between reddit and lemmy, some are even going back there to engage in the subs, and reddit has more content so they probably are spending more time there.
Except don't forget that when people get IP-banned from Reddit (which also blocks people using proxies as of late) for being "too toxic" (even by Reddit's standards!), they come here.
So there are some that have little choice.
If we defederate Hexbear and ml, that will go some of the way to easing those bad experiences for new users
ml is run by the devs of Lemmy so unfortunately that's not realistic, you could be missing on a ton of information if you want to subscribe to Lemmy development or information related communities
those posts get crossposted anyways, you wouldn't be missing much
The devs can make accounts on a less controversial instance if they want their news to be heard by the rest of us
(1) they already did that with lemmygrad.ml.
(2) There are other ways, like watching the actual GitHub repo.
(3) bold of you to presume that this is what they want. Rather they seem quite content to hold that knowledge hostage.
Truly, it's their software and they can do as they please, even put a good fraction of the funding donated to them towards moderating that specific, highly controversial instance rather than further code development.
- Nutomic responding to a feature request
You need to realize that they made Lemmy for themselves, not first and foremost for the benefit of the entire world, thus even something that harms the Threadiverse but that benefits lemmy.ml specifically is preferable to helping everyone at the expense of it. They do not think like you do, and do not want what you want.
See e.g. this description explaining how Lemmy.ml is about to become even more centralized as the authoritarian decider of what communities are to be allowed to be recommended to a new Lemmy instance - thus it will become embedded into the code itself that anything defederated by Lemmy.ml will be cut off from the rest of the Threadiverse by default. Which honestly is easy to override by simply adding the communities manually, but still is evidence that the Lemmy devs are already moving in the exact opposite direction of what you suggested should be done. They have placed that extremely firm line in the sand: either accept Lemmy.ml or make your own Reddit alternative on the Threadiverse (which both PieFed and Mbin are doing).
they're definitely better than reddit's in my experience
I would place them at a quality on par with reddit at the latest five years ago
you still get people who insist on not understanding what words mean, but less frequently
reddits is more oppressive, mainly because your dealing with reddits AI moderation filter, which can apply blanket bannings for no reason at all, and thier bot detection is too overly sensitive, and the mods with thier individual sub filters, and the mods meddling too. and the favorite, report abuse, eventhough you wernt spam reporting.
of course anything to do with trump or saying something should happen to[right wing person] usually immediately catches a temp ban, warning.
you get severely more punished on any community, or posts that are tankie, or /world politics. thats what i noticed, just the other day comment was removed a mod for rebuking a tankie comments, and saying how "harris: was not the sole cause of her own election loss. some people are not seeing the big picture but fixating on a 1 and only cause.
alot are also porn too, which puts people off, and having the tankies posts isnt good either.
Things will improve after the major release with more fine grained controls. Being able to limit community interactions to members will drive up quality engagement and that should drive up retention rates.
1.0 will be good, but probably still many months away
and I kind of doubt most Reddit users will care, maybe we'll gain a few hundred users if we're lucky
How long does Lemmy.world take to update its instance? I am saying that it can take a full year for a new version of Lemmy to propagate out across the Threadiverse.
In the meantime, some instances are simply abandoning Lemmy and converting into PieFed instead, which seems a much quicker route to achieve access to additional features.
As much I love the idea of Lemmy, I've noticed myself I was drawn back to Reddit. Why? Because it has a larger community, of course, but (and please don't shoot me for this), Reddit's algo and rewards. Yes, the achievements gallery is stupid, but it works.
The folks building Lemmy investigating how to increase engagement, this is one factor.
in fact i have been asking for a better Lemmy content recommendation system here
Niche active communities for sure.
I am also banned from reddit and can't contribute. You'd imagine that would pull me more towards lemmy, but just getting the novelty of so many new posts makes it enticing even if I am not interacting.
Instagram and tiktok benefit less from its algo imo than they do from its numerous creators. The novelty drives people. It's complicated I am sure but actively this is what I think about when I reach for these platforms.
I definitely think the trick is having innumerable amount of content.
Damn there's barely anyone here
There's good, actually.
Smaller communities don't fill up with annoying bots and toxic personalities
me the next time i see some reddit user
For me I had so much issue actually making an account, I almost gave up. I think it is cool how Lemmy looks, very simple and very direct, but it does need a bit of more user experience.
Which instance gave you trouble? I think some instances are just bad at handling signups
Have you tried the PieFed sign-up wizard? It's like night vs. day...
Please link
https://PieFed.social/auth/instance_chooser
There's also this very good Lemmy sign-up page: https://join-lemmy.org/
If you click on "Join a Server", it brings you to this dialogue:
Where you can choose Topic and Language which i think is the best way to do it.
@gandalf-der-12te. Trying to interpret your post.
Do you have any comparable data, from other other apps? stuff like engagement %, daily, monthly users and such?
Also also we we could aim for both more quality and quantity. Why not?
Trashy people can always join Trashy instance, or whoever and whenever. That's imo what's Lemmy is all about. A hook in every nook?
i don't have any data on other fediverse platforms at hand rn, but from memory IIRC mastodon has close to 1 million users, and it's by far the biggest chunk of the fediverse.
AFAIK, content-centric networks are only lemmy and piefed as of today, modeled after Reddit. lemmy is bigger (i think) with 30K (active) users.
There's also Mbin, which I'm using. And NodeBB and Discourse if we go beyond Reddit-inspired and include forums.
Good point regarding the differences in content or user driven apps. Hadn't thought of that.
It would be good to have comparable info on trends numbers and such.
Edit : quick search for reddit analysis I can't verify the legitimacy of this page.
But it states that in 2025 they had 116 million unique daily visitors, compared to 1360 million monthly users. That's i like a 1 to 12 ratio for daily & monthly users. This is just one contextual example(#E).
Focusing on quality does not discourage quantity. On the contrary, the phrase "quality over quantity" is intended to imply that the best way to improve quantity is to improve quality.
I have faith in the EU's opensource policy. Things will change. We're in no rush.
Is this like all Lemmy everywhere or just a selection of large instances? Does it account for people that host their own instances and come into the larger spaces to interact? I feel like there's context missing before jumping to conclusions.
It will grab most of it. Some instances are not on there though. I believe Lemmynsfw.com removed themselves a month or so ago.
Ty for the reply!
Should be most of the Lemmy instances, but it's missing the 2k monthly active users on PieFed.
Nice good point on piefed ty
Wait till Reddit fucks up again, there will be an influx of users.
I think one huge missed opportunity is within sharing stuff from lemme...
Other sites will allow you to share media, often with a banner or link back to the original content or source.
For lemme I download the media and there's no branding or linkage that brings you back to the platform (at least not through the Boost app)
Thank god there’s no branding. But I also have found it difficult to share posts to Mastodon for example. They just don’t look good (shared from Voyager)
Maybe you could share a screenshot that includes the address bar instead? 🤣️
No search is THE deal breaker for lots.
There is a search though?
I would say Lemmy's search is better than Reddit's
Reddit search is nearly useless anyway.
i would even say searching and finding are about equally important.
finding means that you stumble upon good content by accident, which is i.e. with content recommendation algorithms. We need a system that shows you similar communities to those that you're already subscribed to. I even made a post about this here.
Also we really need a better way to link to other posts and comments. I.e. it shouldn't bring you to another site but open the link on your site/app/viewer.
PieFed does that, FYI.
yeah i just checked, amazing!
piefed also has this amazingly good dialogue when you sign up:
Haha Lemmy has way too much Trump news IMO!
yeah :(
I even went as far as making a browser extension - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/uglymug/
God, he is hideous.
This Lemmy frontend gives a content recommendation algorithm
https://quiblr.com/
https://quiblr.com/understanding_your_private_personalized_feed
I moved to Mbin, and I know quite a few people moved to Piefed, so you need to take that into account
I hope Lemmy continues to decline, instead Piefed should reign supreme.
What's the likelyhood a white hat group scrubs reddit and makes all of its content available on an alternative fedi instance, preferably in a non western friendly jurisdiction?
I mean... Zero?
But fuck that would be pretty sweet.
What if we figured out the right prompt to get an AI to regurgitate its memorization of reddit and just copied that? Is that still theft if it was already stolen twice?
It's not 100% it but it's close enough. Praise the white hat lords!
Total servers are way down and so are users. But how come the number of comments has increased?
I'm not sure how the comments are counted, but there may be an increase in comments in Lemmy communities made by accounts from other fediverse software like piefed and mastodon.
A lot of those 'users' are bots or paid shills too.
I doubt the latter - we are too small - but many are definitely alts for sure. Lemmy's lack of federation for moderator reports (either coming soon or only came recently I forget which) made that necessary.
Fediverse is a leftist nest. Most people bounce away
God I wish
it's just a matter of time until the internet gets divided into spaces like US, EU, RU and China
I have thought the same thing but i don't think the distinctions will be so clear after all because even today, there's people from China connecting to western internet via VPN. i have some in a chat group i'm in btw.
So yeah, i think some proximity metric would help people to find stuff "near them" - either geographically or content-wise. Like, i'd actually like there to be an easy way to find communities and people near me geographically. It would probably help me make friends and find people that i can be in contact with IRL.
Hate bating much?
huh?
I don't consider this a given. E.g. your new users might all be dingleberries, or they might attract more bots. It also depends on your definition of quality. I quite like recognizing and conversing with regulars that I know from lemmy. This is something you lose with a larger userbase.
Here's another way a high monthly active user count doesn't necessarily lead to a quality platform. Suppose most users post once a month. Conversations will largely be dominated by posts from folks who have no real connection with each other. Any meaningful conversation is drowned in an ocean of seagulls going "have my updoot, kind sir" and "this!". Higher user count, lower quality.
Aside from that, vanity metrics like bare user count typically don't tell you whether you have a sustainable non-ad based platform. You don't need users, you need users willing to donate for the operation (to instance admins) and maintenance (to the devs) of the platform. And I feel (0 data to back this up) like users are more likely to be donating users if they feel like they know the operators and devs personally.
I'm not saying the idea of getting more users is bad, I'm just saying its goodness is very far from established.
This is only looking at active users.
If we look at total users and servers across all Fediverse software you can see both are up.
I personally am not interested in making the active user count always go up. The Fediverse maybe better then Silicon Valley, but the health problems being on the internet too much is still there.
I don't see why we should consider accounts that haven't been used in 6 months, we're talking about content contributions (posts/comments/votes) and those inactive accounts aren't doing anything for that
Active users are what matter. Dormant accounts aren't doing anything.
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reddit goes pretty hard against link dumping,or sharing, its bannable offense. reddit also for some reason started cracking down on new and old inactive account as potential bots, so its risky for new users there.
Relatively there are less US users here compared to Reddit ("only" 50%). Seems the whole demographics is different too.
Why does the y axis not start at 0?
That's because it's not representing the beginning of Lemmy but rather a point in time after.
With y I mean the vertical one.
Lemmy is more stable than what that graph makes it out. I'm not sure how easy it is to track fediverse since instances can pop up at any moment then grow or even the domain can change for an instance
All PieFed instances have ~2k active users. Mbin ones have <1k. Some very few instances (like lemmynsfw.com) do not show up in the OP graph. It changes the numbers a bit to add all of that back in, but not the trends overall: Lemmy's active userbase is decreasing (and by far more than is moving over to PieFed).
Fediverse is changing. People used to put the text of images, like comics, in the body of the OP to be more accessible, but I haven't seen that in ages. It's something I noticed.
I still see that pretty frequently, but I think part of the reduction in frequency is that the community of transcribers has dwindled.
I thought it was the influx of new posters who don't take the time to transcribe their images, a growth in users that surpasses the transcribers. I guess this chart says otherwise and the transcribing users may indeed have dwindled.
I still see that, well at least in the past week
I argue that that's a perfect use case for AI because it can do that well and reliable and it doesn't need to be done by humans manually. You're just annoying users that way when a machine can do it perfectly fine.
the big dip in 2024, oct might have something to do with people going back to reddit and other social media trump news?
I'd argue the opposite, Lemmy was in a decay and Trump and the go European movement prompted a new influx of users to Lemmy. External events didn't cause the dip, but the recovery.
actually i was going to add, that was when reddit started to purge people, all the way back after election, it was pretty clear when reddit became mysteriously quiet for a long period of time.
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https://piefed.social
piefed just seems more like mastodon/twitter than reddit.
It's not. I don't follow that.
when i go to piefed.social, i just see another twitter/mastodon feed. it's all images and memes and etc.
lemmy is more like old.reddit. its text focused. images don't appear unless you expand them. they get equal space/weight. on piefed images take up all the screen space.
? If you are immediately looking at Popular/All, it's going to be basically identical to looking at Lemmy from lemmy.world in terms of the content displayed. Maybe it's not presented in compact view by default?
Ah yes, you can change that on piefed.
The point here is that Piefed is community-based just like Lemmy.
So you can see the loss of users there too?
It's the same federation, how is this a solution?
Come on over and see for yourself.
I think you're right
Everyone I try to explain it to thinks it's reddit but worse. I'm still going to keep trying. The other thing is seeding content and not making reposts. I'm not the most creative person, but I still try to make content for this platform because I love what it stands for. Might do that right now.
This site is seemingly for hardcore left-leaning people. Center and right wing are censored, banned, without violating rules, just like reddit mods. So it's no wonder people are leaving.
Mods or instance owners? This place was never designed to be a free speech zone.
Yes that is the reason.
Not because of the many other reasons like we don't have an algorithm set to be as addicting as possible, dark patterns, rage bait, millions of dollars in marketing and astro-turfing, so many other things that go into your average popular social media network.. I mean there is a reason facebook has so many employees.
No no it's because right wingers get their fee fees hurt when people don't abide their rhetoric.
This isn't a site. It's a collection of sites (instances).
If there is an instance that doesn't tolerate your kind of speech, then choose another instance that does.
Be aware that two of the largest hardcore left-leaning instances (hexbear, ml) have been widely defederated (instance-blocked), so it's not fair to say that this only happens to right leaning or centrist ideas.
The beauty (and point) of Lemmy and fediverse is that if you feel like you're being censored, you can join or make an instance of like-minded people, while still having access to the other area if you want it.
Lemmy is uncensorable, but doesn't force people to listen to you.
Unfortunately, most people are too unintelligent and lazy to learn about the reasons to support reddit-alternatives, and move to them.
Wow. This is peak "I am so smart". You're not smart for downloading an app. Embarrassing
Lemmy is a website, not an app. I never download an app, but it appears that is what you did. It sounds like there's a knowledge deficit on your end, in addition to you being eager to apply labels to people to make yourself feel superior. You should definitely be embarrassed by your ignorant and childish comment that references a very immature and unintelligent subreddit.
I will reiterate that there are very good & important reasons to leave platforms like Reddit, Facebook, etc. Most people are too unintelligent, ignorant, and lazy to learn about them and move away from those platforms.
Wow. This is top notch cringe.
Not everyone, but definitely you.
Good things never last.
Also , People are the problem. They will move again in masses when AI companies fks their reputation online like the recent Grok fiasco
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"How dare LGBT topics exist around me!"
not my point. i think thoses are totally fine. It just reflect that the audience is super niche. You go on massive social network the most liked post are random joke and life experience not really targeted on a minority type of post.
You know you can find huge pro-LGBT topics anywhere on Reddit in any subreddit if something notable happens, right?
Oh no. We're scaring off this type of dipshit.
I'm not worried about the line going down.
*They said some homophobic shit, called the lemmy userbase the r slur collectively, and the replying comment was basically 'u snowflakes would rather be an echo chamber than have diverse opinions'. Yep, happy with where our overton window is. au revoir, francophone bigot.
you said that, but then u will complain of the consequence of the line going down. kinda sad that u preffer this place to be dead rather than your worldview not being the majority opinion here. have fun
As long as Lemmy is in hands of extremists, it wont happen.
You considered Piefed?
I havent been looking for a replacement yet. Right now I'm happy without social media. Maybe even more happy than with it.
Someone's mad the admin's don't like chauvamism
Not mad, I just s spend my time elsewhere, as many do, hence the post that Lemmy is dying.
Admins are crying, contunuosly begging for money.
I've literally never seen anyone here ask for money for anything.
We really don't though.
Can someone vibecode a self hosted tool that reposts reddit top rated content to Lemmy?
Like people that are interested could just run that self hosted service for subreddit they are interested in and it would post automatically into lemmy communities .
i do repost manually sometimes but it's not enough. we need lively discussion more importantly that posts, i'd say.
Well ya. But that requires all of us mentioning lemmy on Reddit and other platforms.
Those fucking reddit owners are sitting quiet now but comes election time they gonna silence dissent
Last I checked people who mention Lemmy still get shadowbanned on Reddit? if so, mentioning thigs doesn't help.
If this is a bit, then well done.
Huh?
No
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Absolutely not
Your comment is like one of those "I love apples" and someone responding "SO YOU HATE BANANAS"