It is probably due to a number of people stopping using their alts after some instance hopping.
Also a few people who came to see how it was, and weren’t attracted enough to become regular visitors.
Curious to see at which number we’ll stabilize.
Next peak will probably happen after either major features release (e.g. exhaustive mod tools allowing reluctant communities to move from Reddit) or the next Reddit fuck up (e.g. removing old.reddit)
Stats on each server: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
Maybe it’s because the content here just isn’t as vast. I’m nkt going back to reddit for awhile, but there’s so little to see on lemmy to me. Despite numerous subscriptions, I see very few memes and far too much political content. Of that political content it’s all the same. Sometimes this place feels like a hive-mind. Not that Reddit wasn’t, but it depended on the sub. Now it’s shaped by instance and everything here just feels stale
I see very few memes and far too much political content. Of that political content it’s all the same.
That’s funny because the meme subs still far outpace posting from politics subs for me, and I mostly see memes.
In fact, a few weeks ago, there were lots of complaints in meme comments of how the only thing they saw on the site was memes.
Memes may be thriving but niche interest communities can’t even get off the ground.
So just like reddit 14 years ago when I first left Digg for greener pastures. When I joined, it was years before my local city subreddit sprang to life, and for years, it had around 1000 active accounts and only now has over 10k accounts.
Man, if the people on reddit back in the day had sat around complaining about lack of content like this, the site would have died. Instead they started making fucking content.
It takes time for communities to grow, and it feels like a lot of the folks who left reddit only ever knew reddit as a ready-made-community filled with thousands of people already. As in, they were latecomers and missed all the slow growth.
Well, considering we are in a post about the userbase shrinking maybe the situation is not quite the same.
I also don’t have that kind of time and energy to get a whole community running just for the kicks anymore, and I definitely do not appreciate to have the deficiencies of this place thrown on my face as if that’s my responsibility. It’s not exactly welcoming or motivating.
Well, considering we are in a post about the userbase shrinking maybe the situation is not quite the same.
Reddit admins literally ran bot accounts to fill content on reddit and make it seem more active at first. The users who came from Digg had similar complaints, and reddit userbase fluctuated at lot in the first few years. It’s actually exactly the same (minus the admins using bots to make it seem more active).
I also don’t have that kind of time and energy to get a whole community running just for the kicks anymore
No one is asking you, specifically, to do it.
Maybe we should ask spez to come over and help generate engagement :P
Eh, remains to be seen. The pacing of the internet today is very different.
No one is asking you, specifically, to do it.
Then don’t get on my case for not liking the lack of content, geez!
Sorry, I just think it’s a dumb, entitled complaint. I’m not asking you to do anything other than stop whinging.
Maybe I need to be on ml then. I feel like world is just full of the same.
I quite like beehaw and their communities, and yeah, you’re missing out on those if you’re on world, from what I understand. (Fairly sure they’re still defederated.)
I personally like lemmy.ml, but I know it’s not for everyone, and the admins would prefer to keep it a smaller instance, I think. I’m only here because there weren’t as many federated servers three years ago when I made an account.
You also might check out !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone, they flood my feed with good memes.
I blocked 196 because it was just shitty memes being spammed
196 is amazing
Just gotta follow The Rule
deleted by creator
Kbin is a nice alternative. Content cycles out of Hot a lot faster on here.
You also get microblogging support on here, so you have access to the Mastodon side of the fediverse as well without having to copy and paste links.
Try out Kbin, as well. Personally I have none of the usual Lemmy complaints
Are there any decent iOS apps for kbin yet? I almost never browse these sites on desktop (hence why I have completely left Reddit since Apollo died).
Currently using Memmy on iOS which is great.
Kbin doesn’t have an api yet, so apps aren’t supported (there are some in the works though for when the api goes public). In the meantime, you can install the pwa through a browser.
The PWA is very decent for a basic browsing experience. There are a few in the works, most notable being Artemis which is now in public beta I think. It uses the new Kbin API which is also in beta.
For now, the app can only be used with the artemis.camp instance, but soon Kbin.social and the rest Kbin instances will use the API and be usable with the app as well. It is inspired by Apollo btw
Thanks for the info. I’ll have to check it out!
Even the memes are pretty stale, definitely not dank. Many of these memes are reposts of stuff I saw years ago on Reddit.
Political memes are so stale these days.
I see very few memes and far too much political content
Where are you even looking? My timeline is flooded with memes all the damn time. They’re practically drowning out any posts of value at this point.
You should block the meme communities if you dislike it, keep the communities with contributions you like.
Not that Reddit wasn’t, but it depended on the sub. Now it’s shaped by instance and everything here just feels stale
Been saying this for months. No one seems to understand what made reddit grow, and it is ironically very much like /r/place when you get down to it:
Reddit was a singular canvas that all users worked on together. Posts, comments, and voting shaped the site as a whole. The front page of Reddit was the result of it’s userbase, and it’s userbase was diverse. Because Reddit forced all users, of all backgrounds and ideologies, to exist together in the same space, and work on the same canvas, it created something living and varied.
You may not have ever gotten along with people from a certain subreddit in th comments, but I promise, the two of you worked together at one point to get a post to the front page or a comment to the top, and you didn’t even know it. Thos little moments where diametrically opposed people shared a liking of something by how they voted. On the surface, everyone bickered. Under the hood, they were all unknowingly agreeing and cooperating all the time, and that was what powered reddit’s engine: it’s diverse userbase’s activity.
That’s why gated communities like Tildes and all these curated instances will never reach Reddit levels: they are starving the engine.
That’s why gated communities like Tildes and all these curated instances will never reach Reddit levels: they are starving the engine.
The phrasing here kinda implies this is a bad thing and everyone should be focused on 🚀 constant growth 🚀.
Tildes in particular has an extreme focus on quality over quantity and has some really interesting ideas on moderation (that haven’t been implemented due to lack of time on Deimos’ part). The site is still considered an alpha after all this time.
I think the default activity sort is part of the problem. Sorting by activity means everyone is just looking at and engaging with the same topics for 24 hours or so. There needs to be some “hot” category or something so that new stuff gets churned through a bit more regularly. New is too new, top is even more stale, activity causes things with high activity to stay high. It makes for very samey content.
Hot exists, doesn’t it?
In my experience, Active and Hot have been opposite extremes of freshness. Active shows posts that are more than a day old, and Hot shows posts that have no comments and are just a couple of minutes old.
Not to say it’s all bad. Your post was just a couple of scrolls down on my feed.
I vote for sorting by new comments… I’m generally entertained with this setup
Have they finally fixed this to not show old posts out of nowhere in the “Hot” feed? I’ve been avoiding this sorting because of that and hadn’t read anything about it being corrected… yet.
I don’t remember if it was fixed in 18.3 or 18.4, but it has been for a while.
Worth giving it a try, even if your instance is still 18.3
Ooo! I will, thanks!
I see very few memes and far too much political content.
This is what is turning me off from lemmy, worst of it I see a lot of shitty political memes, it wasn’t this bad at the beginning of the reddit exodus.
And then there isn’t seem to be a neutral instance, I was in world and then they banned the piracy community, I moved to lemm.ee and all I see is stupid hexbear posts, I appreciate that they don’t defederate willy nilly but Lemmy urgently needs the block instance feature from user level.
In the meantime there are some apps that “block” instances. Connect has it, but it doesn’t fully block the instance, more like it shows up in the feed with a content warning that the message is from a blocked instance and you can choose to view it if you want. I also do think lemm.ee will defederate from hexbear pretty soon. The admin has had personally horrendous experiences with their users and that meta thread about it was a dumpster fire of hexbear users making unrelated political comments and blocking the actual instance users from having a discussion. It got locked at almost 2000 comments so I’m sure he’s still digging through that toxic waste to make his decision.
Noted! Good feedback.
Every time I peek into reddit, it’s just a dumpster fire of toxic comments screaming at each other with strawman arguments and reeing that videos are fake. It’s exhausting.
The cope is strong. Let’s not pretend fewer active users is a good thing. It just means people are unhappy and are leaving.
If the stats are accurate then this is not necessarily due to people being unhappy and leaving as both comments and posts are still stable - indicating that the lower active count are lurkers, duplicates or otherwise non engaging accounts.
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
That said, you can come up with statistics to prove anything! Forfty percent of all people know that.
duplicates or otherwise non engaging accounts.
Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if duplicate accounts are a part of this but that seems like it would be a natural part of growing pains for lemmy. The way the fediverse is built would suggest that people who are serious about long-term participation may bounce around a bit. For example, I joined in June but in that time I still managed to test out two other instances before settling on a third that seemed to strike the ideal balance between admin policies and reliable uptime to suit my needs.
Good point!
Yup if I hadn’t blocked several communities from appearing constantly in my feed, I would leave too.
Right. Everything negative about Lemmy is being turned into a positive for some reason. Truth is this is still a difficult concept for a lot of people to get on board with and the overall reliability of instances leaves much to be desired. All we need to do is continue to contribute and see what takes off.
But just remember: Some of those people that are not staying are the types of people you wouldn’t want to interact with anyway. If the roughly 10k people who quit were Nazis (for example), it’s a good thing.
But they obviously aren’t all Nazis
Hmm… I think we need to conduct some exit interviews to gather data before we start making any assumptions.
“Hello, you have selected ‘Delete Account’ is this because you are a Nazi?”
Y/N (circle one)
“You have selected ‘no’ and yet you still wish to delete your account? Why are you lying about not being a Nazi then?”
About as useful as the ‘have you ever or are you planning to participate in a genocide’ tickbox on immigration forms.
Although there’s a troubling part of me that worries that Nazism has been normalised enough that people would willingly say yes.
Exploding heads is literally shutting down. So he may have a point.
Yeah, I tend to think that most of the people who left wouldn’t be valuable members of the community anyway. Maybe they’re too impatient to deal with software that isn’t fully mature, maybe they can’t deal with the fact that most Lemmy instances are somewhere between leftish and outright communism, or maybe the somewhat chaotic nature of the fediverse turns them off. Whatever. I hope they find something that suits them.
I also hope, for their own sake, that the “something” doesn’t involve going back to reddit.
As I said in a comment below, I would like this to be a signal for interest groups to choose one of the dozens communities they have, stick to one and make it grow.
Looking at gaming or books, always seems detrimental to have the . world, .ml, .sh.itjust.works and so on with the same content posted everywhere.
Almost like there should be one central hub… that’s what Reddit did right
Having android related communities be on one, specific instance has done wonders for the community imho
There doesn’t need to be one central hub, more like a few core communities
lemmy.world being down half the time probably made a lot of people think that this platform is trash and left.
The number of times Lemmy.world was down made it unusable for me to use. Switched to Lemdro.id and it’s so much better now.
I am on Lemm.ee and haven’t had a single issue
Tbh it did affect me, I had just joined and it was out often, & it seemed like a hassle (being new) to find and join new instances or w/e especially when I had to create a new account for every one. Didn’t necessarily think it was trash just buggy and unreliable especially for that to be happening during such a big migration (after Reddit changed the api’s)
Idk it’s nice here but that did reduce my usage. Something that I’m new on being down for a day or two means I’m less likely to use it the next day and incorporate it into my daily routine
You probably figured it out by now, but you don’t need to create a new account for every instance. You can just go to www.yourinstance.com/c/community@otherinstance.com and comment or subscribe there.
I think a good third of what I have typed or posted so far on Lemmy has never succeeded as submitting them would cause it to stop responding and never compete. Refreshing will bring the page back up and allow me comment, but it’ll not work most the time.
Their downtime has been pretty severe… growing pains, I get it, but it’s not just that.
After several attempts at retyping it all, then trying to copy and paste to try to post again just got to me a bit. It’s taking a lot out of me as I’m personally struggling in life to try to communicate with people, with it being flakey all the time, it’s feels like when you have to repeat yourself, then just give up.
It’s a shame because I wanted to post in me communities, but I couldn’t. I keep seeing “View reply” on my comments, but they frequently never load or just vanish. I do wonder if they’re broken/incomplete replies.
you should have left lemmy.world a month ago. those issues dont happen elsewhere
You should probably move instance.
https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim can be useful
I’m getting pretty tired of the obvious “Big tech company bad, Twitter dead, Linux good” bias that Lemmy seems to have. It’s definitely decreased my usage over the last week or two. I guess it kind of comes with the territory given Lemmy is a more complicated platform that will naturally attract more tech-oriented users, but it’s still getting super old seeing the same flavor posts every single day.
Switching between “Active” and “Top [1h/6h/12h]” at different times of the day has provided me with enough content & interactions to make Lemmy my new home. I always was a lurker on the old site, no comment nor post, not even an account. Now, I’m slowly trying to break from this habit. Being on Lemmy feels like I’m not shouting in the void; when a platform gets too big, you get lost in the crowd. It’s always nice to see recurring usernames on different communities.
There is no infinite doomscroll on Lemmy and that’s what I used to do on Reddit. Now, I just read the top headlines and touch grass :)
The reason I’m still here instead of there is that I absolutely can’t use their official app. I just can’t. It’s so awful. Lemmy isn’t perfect but at least it isn’t that. So I do spend less time doom scrolling and that’s probably good for me.
@lagomorphlecture @Oppawaifu what is the best lemmy client you think? or overall [[fediverse]] client?
Client as in app? I go back and forth between Connect and Voyager. They both have some benefits and drawbacks but overall I really just want something super simple and plain. I used RIF for so long and it was just to the point and functional. I never had a single issue with it. The lemmy apps will improve though. They’ve been developed fastly and furiously (haha) but it usually takes a little more time to put something together that’s really good.
Yep a month ago the only Lemmy app was Jerboa. Now there are so many and they keep improving. My favorite right now is Liftoff.
Interesting to see you don’t like Sync (I don’t either, but people seem to like it overall)
I used Reddit Sync for about a decade before switching to Infinity for Reddit, tried giving Sync another go after the Lemmy version released and it just felt wrong whereas the Lemmy fork of Infinity is a joy to use (and is FOSS)!
I prefer Infinity too, but was a huge Infinity fan so I guess it makes sense
I actually haven’t tried it but now I’m going to so I know if I dislike it or not. I can’t be in the dark on this!
Enjoy ha ha
First impression is that the UI isore customizable and I can get closer to RIF which looks way better to me. I haven’t even logged in yet though but at first glance I don’t hate it. I guess I need to check liftoff too though.
There is a middle ground between “infinite doomscrolling” and just barren. I miss a lot of communities I used to browse on Reddit and they aren’t taking roots here. Losing more people isn’t a good sign.
Yep, I’m finding about half of my Reddit usage satisfied. I’ve got all the technical talk I want, but no gaming or writing communities.
What are those communities you miss?
A variety of fandom and franchise-based communities, some artistic communities, some more specific sub-communities like Patient Gamers which exists but it’s pretty slow.
Patient Gamers which exists but it’s pretty slow.
Sounds about right
Very patient for sure
That will change soon enough.
Same here, I actually have a much healthier relationship with social media when on Lemmy vs Reddit. That might change as Lemmy grows in user content but for now I’ll enjoy the quieter experience
Precisely. And maybe bring the grass to Lemmy a little bit
E: see my posts
I agree, I finish up my daily feed (at the moment I am subscribed to 628 communities).
And at the beginning everyone was worried about “Eternal September”. It’s only been two months.
People will come in waves, instances and communities will grow and die, just like how it was on reddit, we’ll probably start seeing meme/politics free or even more specialized instances soon. But all of this is going to take time.
The turning point will be when companies/websites start spinning up their own Lemmy instances as their official one to replace their forums, which I think will happen.
So, being on Lemmy is a long term investment for me.
Same for me, good to still see you around
Hopefully this works out, gotta get that first mover advantage in, then Lemmy’s only real celebrity will be recognized as the marketing genius that she is. :)
I like Lemmy better when it’s when it’s nicer and quieter a month ago honestly.
Are you the actual Margot Robbie? Seen your profile before, but just assumed it was someone who liked them and was capitalizing on the movie.
If Margot Robbie were to be here, we would have 50x more people around
And have the paparazzi scrutinize me over every single dumb comment I ever post here? No thanks.
If I wanted that, I would have just got a Twitter with a blue checkmark, and I really don’t like Twitter.
Well, the movie promotion ended early due to the strike, so I’m just shitposting and having fun here now.
It’s good to keep plausibile deniability. I don’t want to get bad PR in case things don’t work out.
No one will ever believe you anyways.
No one will ever believe you anyways.
oh I see we’re ripping off Bill Murray now.
No, they’re the mod of an android comm on here so obviously not her. I think the roleplayers from back in the LiveJournal days are showing up here cause you can still grab newish usernames to impersonate someone.
Ha ha :)
Same feeling here, browsing All now is cumbersome due to the low quality of the average content dropping
Yeah, so that’s why I’m expecting way more alt hopping and defederations and people splitting into smaller groups soon until everything finally settles.
One of advantage of the fediverse honestly that it prevents powertripping mods, since it’s so easy to move to another community on the same topic on a different instance with different admins and mods, and while a person can be banned off a particular comm or instance, they can’t be banned from Lemmy as a whole, so reputation matters a lot more right now when everybody kinda knows each other here.
Yeah, lemmy seems like a great alternative to discourse.
The turning point will be when companies/websites start spinning up their own Lemmy instances as their official one to replace their forums, which I think will happen.
I don’t know if this is going to happen, and to be honest I hope it doesn’t. Lemmy is not designed to be a forum and shouldn’t try to be used as a replacement for one.
How is Lemmy not a forum?
Lemmy is a link aggregator. Yes it can serve a lot of (if not all) the functions of a forum but it’s not designed to be a drop-in replacement for something like Discuss or phpBB. It’s different enough that I feel like calling it a forum is not the right term.
What exactly does it do worse than one of those?
Id say finding the latest comment is harder here. Sure, its not that hard when looking post replies. But comment replies? They can be nested, pretty much buried behind the “See more replies” button.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2043
here’s an issue tracker for that, I don’t think it’s really something that fundamentally makes it worse than a forum, honestly.
Oh i wouldnt say its worse at all. I prefer nested replies all the way. Regardless, i still wouldnt say lemmy fits the forum format, again due to the way you access the most recent replies.
In a forum thread, you go to the last page and youve found the latest comment. In a Lemmy post, even if the nested comments arent hidden, its not obvious at first glance which one is the latest comment.
Also, if you “bookmark” a forum thread, youll get notified of any new replies in said thread. On Lemmy, you can check the latest comments from an entire instance or community. But not for a specific post.
Again, id never phrase lemmys format as worse, for i greatly prefer it. But i wouldnt consider it a forum. It simply displays the information diferently
It always dies down after the initial hype. It seems pretty stable now. Compare it to pre-exodus and it is still like hundreds of times more popular then before.
It honestly feels nice because the activity feels human and not just spammy low-effort comments 0:
This is one of the main things keeping a lot of us around I think. It’s not just repost bots of shit I’ve seen 5 times in a month.
Yeah, still we lack variety because our algo doesn’t do a good job of promoting smaller communities. I’d like a lot more niche subs get more popular rather then our few dozen or so that have gotten big, which is still a good thing don’t get me wrong.
https://feddit.nl/c/trendingcommunities is pretty useful!
That I agree with, the other thing that kills me is multiple communities of the same topic just in different servers.
Same here, I think I’ll open a thread about that in the coming days
@regalia
> our algo doesn’t do a good job of promoting smaller communitiesLemmy has an algo for that?
No, the algo for active/hot favor large communties, so smaller ones tend not to show up on the front page. It should be tweaked so smaller ones pop up more often. Reddit solved that somehow, I don’t know what they changed though.
@regalia
> the algo for active/hot favor large communties, so smaller ones tend not to show up on the front pageI presume it’s the same as what determines which posts appear on the front page of a Mastodon server; chronological order of posts. That would favour the larger communities, since people post there more often.
The other limiting factor, I presume, is a Lemmy server only knows about the communities its accounts are members of. Larger communities will have members on more servers.
Huh? Are you replying from Mastodon right now lol
V true. I will say seeing the same post across 5 instances does make me feel like I’m going crazy sometimes so I guess it’s a tradeoff xD
I feel that you underestimate how stubborn I can be with low effort comments. I’ve been making off color, not particularly funny attempted witty comebacks on BBSes, the Internet, and then the World Wide Web for longer than… Oh, it’s been since the early 90’s now. Lemmy is the latest stomping grounds and I’m not giving up here just yet.
Been a little hard to get used to, but I’ve mostly transitioned over from reddit, like I went to it from Digg.
Been using the Connect apk for my phone and everything seems pretty nice with it.
I dropped off because I am unbelievably sick of seeing the same thing posted across 20 different communities. No matter which sort I am using, my front page is CLUTTERED with the same crap.
Pretty sure it’s going to just be like 12 of us. If the third party app thing on reddit didn’t drive users here, unfortunately I don’t think anything else will. At this point if you are already content with the reddit app it’s going to be a hard sell to say, yeah come check out Lemmy, it’s like reddit but if you have a question about your sick betta fish instead of getting a helpful answer in a few minutes, you need to first create a betta fish community, then go back on reddit and recruit users to your Lemmy community. Post content on it daily to maintain interest, and then, if you are really lucky, ask your question and wait a few months and maybe if your fish is still alive (doubtful), you might get a response, but it will probably be just be an anticapitalist shit-post. I’m sorry to say it is this way, but this be the way that it is.
12 of us
I’m fine with 12 of us if everyone is active.
Hopefully by then we’ll have a few active communities and not hundreds of ghost towns like now
Bruh. I’m in group chats with people I know IRL with more than 12 people.
Bring them here!
Summed up my feelings too. Reddit’s larger communities were trash, but for really specific questions, it was unbeatable. Not to mention the fact that most Lemmy pages are either tech-related or tankie propaganda. There’s very little in the way of active hobby/lifestyle boards so unless you’re in either a nerd (non-derogatory) or a communist (derogatory), Lemmy’s not got much going on for you
There’s very little in the way of active hobby/lifestyle boards so unless you’re in either a nerd (non-derogatory) or a communist (derogatory), Lemmy’s not got much going on for you
So true.
I have been trying to revive !personalfinance@lemmy.ml , !casualconversation@lemmy.world , even !parenting@lemmy.world but it feels a lot like shouting into the abyss.
There’s a bunch of really niche subs I used to be on. Finding info on some of my old cars has been a bitch since I cut out reddit but it’s taught me a lot about self-reliance haha
Well, i am here directly due to reddit policy changes. The loss of a viable mobile option forced me here. I can’t believe I am not an average case. I am enjoying this experience so far and will definitely spread the word. But i will continue to use reddit on the computer… I am surprised that there are only 60,000 of us here though.
JFC there’s only 60k of us? And that’s a good thing? 😳
Yeah, it’s not a good thing and I’m getting sick of people on here trying to gaslight themselves into thinking it is. The same people saying that this is good are also mocking X and threads for losing users. Nobody’s claiming that’s good for those platforms.
We want growth, more users and more instances is better for Lemmy overall.i don’t buy this arguments of “people are just not using their alts”, I mean fuck off, that statement was pulled from OP’s arse with nothing to back it up.
This drop in users is natural though - not every person that got here with a hype train was expected to stay here, just like users who joined Lemmy just to wait until protests are over. Some users may switched from lemmy to kbin and are still with us, just using another software.
Before the exodux Lemmy was really empty. That’s why people are so optimistic about the future of the threadiverse.
A slower growth trend would be “natural” as you describe it, but a drop in users should only be concerning at this stage, especially as the platform is still so young. Even a small amount of growth is still growth but a decline in users means more people are leaving the platform than joining it.
Again, you’re pulling explanations out of thin air - go ahead and prove that those users are switching to kbin over lemmy, use some data to back up your claim.
Or accept that we have a problem with adoption and as a community we need to fix it.
User growth hasn’t stopped, check this.
Again, you’re pulling explanations out of thin air - go ahead and prove that those users are switching to kbin over lemmy, use some data to back up your claim.
I said “Some users may switched” - I claimed nothing.
Or accept that we have a problem with adoption and as a community we need to fix it.
Lemmy is improving, mobile apps are in rapid development, and seems good (never used one so am judging from what I’ve heard), communities are being created everyday. No one in this thread said that Lemmy is in perfect state and we have nothing to improve. If you have some ideas on how can we make Lemmy better, you’re free to share them.
User growth hasn’t stopped, check this.
Are you referring to the graphs here? The ones that show:
- Monthly Active users in decline
- Daily active users in decline
Those graphs?
Sure, 6-monthly users is increasing (and plateauing) and people sure are posting more comments, but those graphs do not paint a good picture and do not suggest positive user growth.
No one in this thread said that Lemmy is in perfect state and we have nothing to improve.
That’s exactly what some people in this thread are claiming. Every time someone says “Good, less users is a good thing”, they’re saying nothing needs to change because that’s what they want. I am saying that is not the case and I stand by that.
Lemmy is improving, but it clearly needs to go a lot further to start attracting users again.
Sure, 6-monthly users is increasing (and plateauing) and people sure are posting more comments, but those graphs do not paint a good picture and do not suggest positive user growth.
Yep, this graph basically shows that growth hasn’t stopped, it was just overtaken by the drop in Lemmy users. I will return to it a bit later.
Every time someone says “Good, less users is a good thing”, they’re saying nothing needs to change because that’s what they want
Only if it’s taken outside of context. Okay, I admit I shouldn’t claim “No one said that”, but in many cases people aren’t celebrating the decrease of Lemmy users. For example, OP clearly stated:
It is probably due to a number of people stopping using their alts after some instance hopping. Also a few people who came to see how it was, and weren’t attracted enough to become regular visitors.
From my perspective, this decline is a consequance of a rapid growth during last months: people were promised with a new reddit, but they got lemmy, with its quirks and issues. Of course, some people weren’t satisfied with it - and when protests on reddit came to an end, they could finally abandon lemmy for the platform they were actually interested in.
That’s why I pointed out on the fact user growth never stopped - Lemmy’s still attracting new users, just people who weren’t interested in lemmy in the first place decided to leave.
Side note: OP did originally have the phrase “And that’s good for lemmy” (or something very similar to that) in the title of this post, but they’ve since edited it. I don’t know of a way of recovering what the original title said to be certain but it’s worth knowing this, as that’s a lot of the context behind this thread around why people (like myself) are decrying those that are saying it’s a good thing.
growth hasn’t stopped, it was just overtaken by the drop in Lemmy users
Can you explain to me how this isn’t a complete contradiction? How has growth not stopped while users have? That doesn’t make any sense to me. Are we saying there’s user growth or not?
That’s why I pointed out on the fact user growth never stopped - Lemmy’s still attracting new users, just people who weren’t interested in lemmy in the first place decided to leave.
I’m trying to understand your viewpoint here, but I’m just not getting it. Overall users are in decline, that’s not good. Sure, I have no doubt that we’re still attracting new users but we’re still losing users as well - more than we’re attracting. We’re at a net loss of users and that’s not good.
A decline seems natural. Of course there are many people who came to lemmy to check it out, and not all of them stuck with it. That is to be expected, no?
Okay but how do we fix it? Are we allowed to solicit on reddit just to get people here? Are Lemmy users even getting the word out about Lemmy?
This isn’t exactly the easiest platform to use. The term “instances” is probably intimidating to the average reddit user who has to do nothing more than type “reddit.com” to get to where they need to be.
I think the honest answer is to become active and solicit on Mastodon. Those users are not only far more open to the pitch of “Mastodon but with threaded discussions” but are far more legitimately engaged and active than Reddit users.
EDIT: Not to mention they can literally participate from their existing accounts. Super easy to get your foot in the door.
Okay but how do we fix it?
I think you answer your own question -
This isn’t exactly the easiest platform to use.
I quite like lemmy, but the barrier to entry is far too high to enjoy the platform. Assume your user doesn’t give a flying monkies about federation and things like that, they just want the memes and content - if we can crack that, we might be onto something.
I was just hoping for something more than a meme/news site.
You can get that anywhere. So Lemmy isn’t exactly standing out.
The same people saying that this is good are also mocking X and threads for losing users.
These are not comparable. X and threads are businesses which maximize their profits by making their platform as big as possible. That is not true for Lemmy and even if it were, the average user does not care about the platform’s profits. So you can in fact make fun of the failures of big companies while being happy being part of a much smaller platform.
Also Lemmy is becoming a larger platform and Twitter- or “X”- is becoming a smaller platform. Sure total users might be down since right after the Exodus but that is obviously normal, a new baseline will be established that’s still significantly above the pre Exodus baseline. Then reddit inc will do something else stupid and people on the site will be talking about Lemmy again.
I think there’s positives and negatives to having a small platform, and there’s positives and negatives to having a larger platform. With a smaller platform, the quality of the comments in general is much higher with less low effort jokes which usually you’ve already read 500 times. With larger platforms, the smaller communities are much more active because there’s a larger pool to draw those people with niche interests from.
and people on the site will be talking about Lemmy again
honestly I wonder if it would be more effective to be talking about lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, compuverse.uk, beehaw.org… pretending they’re just their own things and not talking about Lemmy or Federation or anything like that
might be good to get some users to just signup to the given instance, and slowly realize they’re actually communicating with people from many servers and now they’re in the rabbit hole lol
Maybe, people do talk fondly about the days of forums that were dedicated to specific subjects with small communities where people all know each other and an instance can be much like that. Although sometimes what people actually want is different to what they really want, you know? Although I also do remember forums mostly too.
I think it’s still good to talk about Lemmy and the fediverse is still good, I joined Lemmy earlier this month and the way ActivityPub works was quite appealing to me and really made me want to switch. It was slightly unintuitive at first but someone described it as being like the email protocol where you can view emails from anyone even if they’re on say gmail and you’re on Yahoo mail/proton mail/ self hosted email/etc and that made it make complete sense.
The average user cares about the health and quality of the platform though and a declining user-base is not good for either of those.
Sure, we don’t want to be flooded with millions of users either but that’s because we have a distinct lack of mod tools and features to deal with it. The solution is better tools and better ways of handling those users, not to keep the platform isolated and haemorrhaging users.
Do you need to be so agressive?
I mean, if you are saying the sky isn’t blue, why not? A drop in users is a bad thing. Lemmy needs people and it needs content. This smells of the “good for bitcoin” meme all over again.
I edited because it seems it was too controversial, but anyway.
I commented saying that this should probably be a signal for people to start focusing on a few core communities instead of spreading like crazy.
It seemed that people were thinking that users would magically come to every community and make them active, but we are seeing the opposite. Which for me was a good thing because it would make people realize platform growth doesn’t happen magically.
Yeah I think people have what happened to Digg in their minds and think there’ll just be one single huge Exodus and Lemmy will explode over night, but that’s unlikely. We just have to keep trucking and overtime reddit inc will make more and more stupid decisions and each time Lemmy and the dedicated will grow a but larger. Not to mention Twitter is imploding even faster, maybe we’ll gain users from there.
Having a small community in the meantime isn’t so bad anyway, there’s less low effort comments and you can recognise people sometimes which is cool. There’s positives and negatives to both small and large communities.
I commented saying that this should probably be a signal for people to start focusing on a few core communities instead of spreading like crazy.
I mean this place only really seems to have activity in meme pages, porn, and news.
Feels more like a well behaved 4chan instead of a well behaved reddit.
There is !trendingcommunities@feddit.nl to discover new ones.
But I mostly agree, you have to look up for content outside of those 3.
I tried to revive !personalfinance@lemmy.ml , !casualconversation@lemmy.world and !moviesandtv@lemmy.film, but that’s harder than planned
yeah I’ve been using the lemmy explorer and most places are just one person posting into the void with no additional interaction.
It does explain why all the niche communities I visit have gone from quiet to abandoned.
That and the sorting at this time really doesn’t allow for niche communities to grow.
This is one of the biggest issues with Lemmy right now.
I’m gonna keep holding out cause I hope that Lemmy will have improvements like sorting algorithms and mod tools and such, users have stabilized.
If the users keep going down I might have to go back to Reddit, a man can only laugh at the same Linux meme so many times.
Same and I hate that I would have to go back to reddit. I like that I can have decent conversations here but I also miss being able to talk about niche shows I like and quote things with people. The niche interests that Reddit offers isn’t really on Lemmy.
Like I’m also no longer keeping up with my favorite radio show cause they have a sub Reddit and the people who listen to that show, aren’t the kind of people who can just switch over to Lemmy. They don’t know the first thing about changing platforms.
I already talked to someone else on here on providing my own content and being the change I want to see. But I’ve found so many communities where its just one person posting into the void and there’s lots of posts from like a month ago and zero comments on every single one. Some communities seem to be just people posting news links to other sites. Which makes Lemmy seem like a directory- not a community.
Some subs on Reddit were practically unusable due to the amount of users and the noise they created. Especially if you weren’t in an American timezone so missed the early chatter before everyone piled on. I’ve come to appreciate less users being here.
There’s a happy medium between sitting in an empty bar and eternal summer.
Exactly. More people need to understand that this isn’t a black and white issue. We need that happy medium.
Yeah, especially since you could have smaller, niche subs on Reddit, but those largely don’t work here. The niche subs were some of my favourite.
There’s also some niche subs that need the site to be popular. Eg, AITA or BestOfLegalAdvice (which required LegalAdvice to be mainstream).
When there’s too much people on the social media site, it becomes noisy and unfriendly. I can’t remember any subreddit with more than 20k users being any good.
Quality > quantity
Yes, but larger variety of active communities is better overall.
True, but it will be better overall with a small growth, not what we saw during reddit exodus. And this drop is just a logical end of this rapid migration, and now we’ll see a slow but stable growth in Lemmy usage.
Depends. My main community on Reddit was effectively a link aggregate for a niche hobby that’s well over a million subscribers at this point. And when the reddit blackout happened, it became extremely clear that there isn’t another community out there that aggregates just as much content as they have there.
Lemmy just doesn’t have the tools in terms of tagging and wiki to be able to replace what they’ve got yet.
Tags would be so good for Lemmy actually. Instead of creating new extremely specialized community we could use tags to help those who want this kind of content find it in a less focused community, preventing segregation of small Lemmy user base. And when certain tag gets enough traction we would create a community for it.
Instead we have sorting mechanisms that actively punish small communities and big communities mostly driven by news (e.g. c/technology).
If we had been 60,000 strong at Helmsdeep, Rohan would have fallen
But how many MAU did Rohan have?
@itadakimasu
> there’s only 60k of us? And that’s a good thing?A centralised platform is a numbers game. The money for upgrading servers for growth has to come from one company, and if the platform shrinks it gets harder to get a return on that spending.
It just doesn’t matter as much in a federated network. The cost of growth is spread across many servers. Some of which will end up shutting down, for a range of reasons. But others have room for growth.
(1/2)
@itadakimasu
Plus, the Lemmy servers are part of a much larger network; the fediverse. Not just other forum apps like KBin either. Right now I’m replying to this from Mastodon.I have an alt on a .nz Lemmy server, but haven’t got into the habit of using it yet. So at least some of the perceived shrinkage *is* due to that, rather than any failure of the network. Also due to spam and troll accounts being purged.
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Sorry this is unrelated, but how come your username says @null? Just curious
For me it says @strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz, not @null. Clicking on your comment’s Fediverse button to take me to your instance still shows the same.
Huh that’s odd. It must be an issue with Sync related to them posting from a Mastodon instance.
@Rambi
> but how come your username says @null?No idea. Maybe a bug in your app? Maybe something to do with the fact I’m posting from a Mastodon server rather than Lemmy server?
Oh right it must be an issue with Sync for Lemmy, someone else responded saying your username doesn’t say that for them. Thanks for the response.
There are many fatal problems on Lemmy, worst of all is you can’t click this link /c/books and see every /c/book on every Lemmy instance of the fediverse. This is out of convenience to moderators and it is killing Lemmy. One people figure out communities only exist on a single instance, the promise of federation is broken and they fuck off.
Why do you think communities with the same name will have the same content?
I would love to see something like this where it shows you content from communities with the same name across whatever your server is federated with.
There is no way for a user to block whole instances, there is no way to know if you’ve been banned from a community or instance, it’s extremely easy for people to evade bans and blocks, you can’t make private communities, armies of extremists are brigading other instances and they’re exploiting Lemmy’s flaws to do it, the list goes on and on.
Lemmy blows, but give the rubes time. They’ll figure it out.
Good point indeed
See https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3033 It’s won’tfix/notabug
These numbers are not descriptive. Check out the daily stats.
- Active users per day has already stabilised.
- Active users half year is still climbing so we have people coming in.
- Shitposts per day are growing exponentially.
- People are still leaving from the Reddit influx. Lemmy just wasn’t for them.
Source: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=120
Active users half year is still climbing so we have people coming in.
If people were coming in, shouldn’t the monthly active users increase as well?
If the MAU is decreasing, it means that we are losing more people than people joining. On your graph, the MAU trend is clearly decreasing.
Maybe I’m missing something?
People are going out faster than they’re coming in.
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Regardless of where the loss in users is coming from the major takeaway here is that we are firmly in a reinvestment phase. This will likely last until Reddit does something stupid related to the IPO but in the absence of that we will probably not see a significant uptick in growth again without major improvements to the threadiverse as a whole. That means that those of us who are personally invested in the growth of the threadiverse should be taking this time to develop the tools and features necessary to weather the next wave more gracefully than the last.
One of the biggest issue I see here is still community growth. Growing certain communities is significantly harder than others and if you don’t have a lot of crossposting potential it can be damn near impossible. As it stands, I do not see a way to fix this situation without a hot and active ranking system that takes into account the number of users active in the particular community. As part of a change like this I think we would be best served by consolidating a significant portion of the small dead communities. I think we should also strongly prefer specialized instances like lemmy.film or literature.cafe to truly take advantage of the special attention these sorts of instances are capable of providing particular topics. As it stands only a handful of them have enough broader threadiverse activity to be truly useful.
Another thing I would like to suggest is a change in recruitment strategy. At this point it seems like we are unlikely to pull a significant amount of users from Reddit without more reddit-policy-driven migration, but there are tons of highly educated and engaged users over on Mastodon that would make serious positive contributions to the tone and quality of the discourse over here. For some reason there seems to be minimal overlap between the two communities and that blows my mind. Not only that but I actively see folks disparaging Mastodon in fediverse related communities on a regular basis (and even sometimes in the Mastodon communities themselves). As far as I can tell, these are largely lingering sentiments from a Reddit/Twitter dichotomy. Remember, as things develop the lines between threaded social media and microblogging are likely to blur. A significant number of Mastodon apps already provide a threaded view and one of kbins explicit goals is very much to bridge the gap. With this in mind, Mastodon (and federated microblogging more generally) seems like the best source for new potential users.
I think we should also strongly prefer specialized instances like lemmy.film or literature.cafe to truly take advantage of the special attention these sorts of instances are capable of providing particular topics.
Definitely
The small comms I’m subscribed to don’t show up in any sorting, I have to actually visit them to see there was a new post. I heard the devs are doing something to improve it, so hopefully that’ll make small comms more viable
Another thing I would like to suggest is a change in recruitment strategy. At this point it seems like we are unlikely to pull a significant amount of users from Reddit without more reddit-policy-driven migration, but there are tons of highly educated and engaged users over on Mastodon that would make serious positive contributions to the tone and quality of the discourse over here. For some reason there seems to be minimal overlap between the two communities and that blows my mind. Not only that but I actively see folks disparaging Mastodon in fediverse related communities on a regular basis (and even sometimes in the Mastodon communities themselves). As far as I can tell, these are largely lingering sentiments from a Reddit/Twitter dichotomy. Remember, as things develop the lines between threaded social media and microblogging are likely to blur. A significant number of Mastodon apps already provide a threaded view and one of kbins explicit goals is very much to bridge the gap. With this in mind, Mastodon (and federated microblogging more generally) seems like the best source for new potential users.
A thing to look out for is that the microblog fedi (outside the big handful of instances that fill .world’s role there) is strongly in favor of stricter instance-level moderation compared to the more “individualistic” view a lot of the Reddit migratees tend to have. If we want people from the microblog fedi to participate we (collectively) need to up our moderation game. (And in my personal opinion instances like .world have grown too large to accomodate any reasonable expectation of moderation, except for select individual communities set up there)
If we want people from the microblog fedi to participate we (collectively) need to up our moderation game. (And in my personal opinion instances like .world have grown too large to accomodate any reasonable expectation of moderation, except for select individual communities set up there)
Improved moderation tools would help, however are you familiar with the filtering/muting tools available on Mastodon/Firefish/Misskey? These, coupled with an ability by individual users to block entire instances, help relieve some of the need for more moderators to help by enabling individuals to essentially self-moderate/curate their experiences as desired.
I think both improved moderation and individual filtering/muting tools would help greatly both to encourage microblog folks to join in, and make the experience better for those already here.
stricter instance-level moderation compared to the more “individualistic” view
I definitely think letting users block posts and/or comments from specific instances is way better than full defederation (maybe the instance admin could set a default block list for new users)
but now I’m thinking maybe communities should be able to block instances too
found a feature request for it https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3022
This is a good point. Maybe indicates that recruiting to instances like beehaw.org would be more effective. Once they’re here though I think that is exactly the sort of community that would be likely to take on moderator positions.
The standard web UI also needs major improvements. Nobody logs in through an app for their first time and first impressions are critical. It needs to be easier to navigate and use without downloading an app so people will stick around long enough to get involved and have a good time.
I actually think the web ui is fine but we all have our own blindspots. How do you feel about Alexandrite and Photon? I had good initial impressions of Alexandrite but some minor issues with Photon. Instances could just make those defaults.
What issues did you notice in Photon?
Oh man this is what I get for running my mouth. I’m not sure if my issues are reproducible or if I can even remember well enough to go about trying to reproduce them. I know that’s not very useful and I apologize. I will say that I think a sans serif font option would be nice to have.
It uses your system font.
That’s probably just broken on my system then because it is definitely not using my system font. I’m on a chromebook if that’s useful at all.
Is it fixed on phtn.app? I pushed an update that hopefully fixes this. It uses system-ui so hopefully it isn’t broken
Yeah I am a software dev and was even confused for a bit. Reddit has /r/all and things that make it easier to find subreddits, I still struggle with lemmy sometimes. Sync made it a bit easier, but I wish I could seamlessly browse all instances and their comments under 1 profile
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