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I recently joined Lemmy, i can’t share your experiences with a “decline” but i gotta say Lemmy works because it’s quality over quantity. Recognizing usernames again makes you realize you’re in a small community and people generally have similar interests and passions to you. I (mostly) try to put more thought into what i post here. The change I wanna see in online communities starts with me. 15 Upvotes and a well thought out comment on a post feels more rewarding than a lot of Karma and people trying to 1-up each other with snappy remarks. Also: no bots ❤️
I’m decently satisfied with my experience here. Be careful what you wish for
Unlimited growth is capitalist mindset. Stability and community are what we value here.
The fediverse has been feeling really good lately. It’s actually getting hard to scroll to the end of the frontpage.
Yeah. And we don’t need to attract the MOST people, just the BEST people
Rare user from feddit.it 🇮🇹
feels like there was a missed opportunity there
Could be fedd.it was already taken
Seems like it is… by feddit.it.
To late now though as federation doesnt like domain changes i believe. Even though feddit.de > feddit.org migration seemed pretty seamless.
I might be in the minority but I’m entirely comfortable with moderate explosive growth, it hasn’t hurt bluesky one bit. Especially since explosive growth here implies reddit is dying.
Personally I’d prefer to avoid reddit-ification, it had become very bad in the last few years
i do agree with the sentiment, but i think we’re largely okay on that front:
among the big problems with reddit for the past, say, 10-ish years, was the consolidation of subreddit moderation in relatively few, extremely influential mods. some of which where widely known to be assholes of one kind or another…
the very design of lemmy provides a kind of natural resistance to this phenomenon by spreading communities over many distinct servers, with distinct admins and moderation teams.
it’s by no means perfect, but the simple fact that communities can choose to leave servers that have become unsuitable to hosting them (like we’ve already seen with some of the star trek comms leaving .world…i think that’s the server they left?), it becomes more difficult for power tripping admins or mods to utterly ruin communities. it still causes major disruptions, of course, but i think it’s a decent trade-off!
having already seen that part of the design in action; I’m really not that worried about lemmy turning into reddit.
what’s much more concerning is eventually being overrun by sophisticated, hostile discourse manipulators like bot and troll farms. (if we ever get big enough to attract those…)
while decentralization provides resilience against enemies within, I’m not so sure it does the same for enemies without: coordinating bot defense and using proper authentication for end-users to ensure that the people talking are actually, you know, people, is probably going to be extremely challenging… eventually, at least…
Well, this is really going to tank our quarterly report. What do you think the shareholders are going to say?!
So much this^. No where else did have I gotten more thoughtful and well written responses to my few questions I have raised on askelectronics@discuss.tchncs.de. It “only” has 3.88k subscribers but those who are there are really cool. ~Wish I could be of more help there as well.~ In times where most of search results on the web are AI generated it really is worth a lot. Wouldn’t want it any other way and think that having more might actually be counter productive.
This doesn’t seem to be hoping for unlimited growth but rather that is has stagnated and is even falling. That can kill a community especially when it is as small as it is
Anecdotally, it doesn’t feel like the experience is contracting, or part of a shrinking community. It’s worth asking what the data means, and whether it’s bad, but there are definitely other reasonable factors too. Users from interoperable platforms like mastodon and piefed, individual people using fewer accounts, or even fewer lurkers, could be responsible for a good chunk of the data.
it kinda shrank after lemmy.ee went down, because they moved scattered to piefed,etc. and also blocking people too.
I agree except it feels like people are way more active here than on reddit, me personally I never commented but I comment all the time on here. Lemmy feels really active even without a ton of users (especially discussion threads)
That said, it is unfortunate that this only applies to very general spaces or some specific communities. If your interest is even a little too niche, the dedicated communities often feel like a graveyard unfortunately.
That is true because the individual engagement is much higher in a smaller community. On reddit you’d just be one of thousands shouting into the void. It also helps that Lemmy pushes new comments to the top.
Yeah the pushing new comments to the top is my favorite part about lemmy, it’s a good mix of top comments and I still get to see a -20 comment from time to time (and sometimes they’re right)
its probably due to self-censorship because subs, and reddit is ready to ban you at the moments notice for saying something they think its violating the rules(misconstruing) and not do actually violating by being vitrolitic, or bigotic. you have to be careful what you say on reddit.
You see decline. What I see is that a remarkable number of users have remained.
Agreed, so much is stacked against us, these numbers show we are serious about making alternative communities.
probably went back the mainstream ones like reddit, and the others, assuming you wernt banned in any of those platforms permananetly.
And yet the graph is going down…
Nah its basically stable. Green is monthly which fluctuates with seasons (more people in northern hemisphere and spend more time online in winter months). The blue line is yearly rolling average and the initial spike takes a long time to work though giving impression of gradual decline.
People have started using Piefed insted of Lemmy, but I’m not sure we should throw away hope for the fediverse because of that.
Piefed is part of the Fediverse so surely it’s still a good thing overall?
PieFed and Mbin are both different implementations of the ActivityPub Protocol just like Lemmy. Although I doubt this graph includes either of them, despite how many left Lemmy for Piefed when Lemm.ee went down.
I looked and PieFed adds another ~1600 monthly active users and Mbin a further ~700 to the mix. PieFed starts out its chart with single digit user counts and ends with three orders of magnitude growth, so definitely not flat at all, though stable over the last few months.
I think Piefed has mostly been migrations from Lemmy (especially from lemm.ee), that’s why it had a big jump and then seems to have stabilised.
PieFed is also advertised often over in Reddit, like in r/RedditAlternatives.
It’s all or nothing baby! Let’s burn it down if something isn’t perfect from day one.
People will come in waves, some will share the same mindset and others will seek out more dopamine centric engagement.
Yeah, we need more users. The fediverse/lemmy is stagnating in content because we don’t have enough people with niche interests. It’s mostly US-centered politics; we need more stuff from around the world. Fediverse/lemmy needs more users.
I like it the way it is, but fuck me right
Same. I migrated from reddit because reddit are miserable bastards. There’s still some humanity here
The worst of the trolls seem to get bored and move on.
Most of the posts here have good intentions and the admins are trying to keep things good
I mean, we could, but we lack the niche communities…
;)
Do we? Why do we need the niche communities?
Reddit didn’t start with them either. Neither did Digg.
Also, it was a joke about keenflame asking us to fuck them and that being a niche community.
Seriously though, the algorithm is a powerful mistress. Every time somebody leaves here to go visit a niche community that we’re lacking. They get a taste of that sweet algorithm again.
I managed to pretty much carve out all the algorithms in my social graph. Most of the stuff I’m seeing is from communities that I’ve curated. There is no doom scrolling on my feed. I really dearly love being able to consume, get the most important news and a couple of lols and then go about my day.
Well, no, the site doesn’t /need/ them as such but 100% it’s a major issue for people coming over. Their hobbies are represented on Reddit. But not on here.
All dig needed was the Florida man tag, And not to release dig 2.0
Back in my day, we kept StickPage.com alive with a community of maybe 100 animators. We were happy and productive. 😁 Quality over quantity. Chin up!
Let’s talk about the Overton window.
At some point in time, the major social platforms will fuck up - probably by way of AI - and end up in a collective scandal that gives people a bad taste in their mouthes.
At that point y’all better have your talking points, framing, concepts and schpiel at the ready, because it’ll be another chance to adopt even more users. So let me stress a couple of things:
You win more bees with honey, you should be more concerned about peoples wellbeing than your own opinion and start collecting valuable, objective and giving accounts - be they international, but most preferably local - across the fediverse to share with new users.
AGAIN!! You being a toxic little shit will repell people. If you REALLY CARE about GETTING PEOPLE OFF OF PREDATORY CORPORATE PLATFORMS plz be mindful, kind, shower, groom, keep your inside humor to your inside group, learn some rhetoric to improve your communication skills and remember:
👏 you 👏 win 👏 more 👏 bees 👏 with 👏 honey
Being on your A-game does not mean Asshole-game. Plz do not stink up the place.
This certainly needs to be said and I know exactly what your talking about, but lets be real here. This is an online space, it’s always gonna have that element to it.
I’m personally very excited to have more folks flow in from reddit tho.
I’m personally very excited to have more folks flow in from reddit tho.
That would definitely stink up the place. But… I have a plan.
We need to come up with a new SSO for the fediverse, one that has an OPAD that only yields a code if it doesn’t detect BO.
Probably because >50% of the posts on here are about depressing American politics
Or “windows sucks, yay linux!“
Star Trek too!
Well I don’t apologize for that one.
Would never ask you to.
Well goddammit I’ve gotta post more now then don’t I? Gimme a second to start the music…
Also another meme to add to the folder of memes made about me… I have a folder. This is such a weird feeling.
Tell your godfather I said that I do not know him but I love him and wish him nothing but the most aggressive (in however he wishes it) Pon Farr.
Start the music you say? Daring today, aren’t we? [Full disclosure, everything I know about Star Trek comes from memes and the 12 or so TNG episodes I’ve seen]
don’t forget the ’ i am sad and lonely and broke, how do i get a gf’ posts.
I have literally never seen one post like that on lemmy.
Maybe they’re confused about the greentext communities.
deleted by creator
Permanently brigaded lmao
only because you keep joining them, i blocked out the main politics instances/communities, and there was significantly less of those annoying ragebait posts that you cant seem to think if its a tankie posts, or astroturfed pro-israeli post. even on reddit i avoided most of them, because i been burned one too many times by those subs for pointing out ragebaiting, or bigotry.
That is a naive point IMO. I have a 50+ word long block list, and I’m still getting US politics, tankie propaganda or climate doomer post on my mainly meme feed. I haven’t figured out how to properly filter them out, but at that point the platform would look almost abandoned from the perceived lack of posts.
Piefed has multicommunities. Makes it easier to have different feeds based on different topics
The issue is there just isn’t as much pull for the European/Canadian/Asian communities yet.
Every now and then I check to see if any activity has upticked in any of the UK subs yet, but the first post is always like a month ago. What can ya do.
The European communities have some activity.
Activity on feddit.uk communities seems quite good?
Maybe they’re looking at !unitedkingdom@lemmy.ml, !unitedkingdom@europe.pub or !unitedkingdom@lemmy.world. Still weird given the UK is one of better served countries on here.
Quality over quantity.
Must not be that. I’m still here.
Haven’t had to deal with a single power hungry mod since I’ve been here.
Fr. I shared a meme the other day and was staring at New for about 10 minutes to see if it would get removed… then I remembered “This is Lemmy” lol
You could try to upload a pic on r/Pics and it would get autoremoved for “Having the wrong amount of pixels”, and if you fixed it and messaged a mod they’d tell you “Actually we no longer accept .jpegs or .pngs. WebP only. Also, this is now considered a repost.” I’m barely exaggerating.
Oh boy. Yepowertrippingbastards are a thing on lemmy.
Have you blocked .ml?
Hahaha
they are all on reddit, where all the addiction is, and plus alot of the supermods seemed to be associated with the admins or is an admin themselves.
No they’re definitely here, just go disagree with Dessalines on .ml
Unfortunately there is a handful of “power users” spamming low quality memes in all 10 communities they created, every day.
Block them?
It is what it is. I have no idea how to incite a new wave short of Reddit shitting itself in some way
I think what we can try to do is to create an active community.
In the old place, I recognized I really came for the comments. That’s why I try to keep my threshold for commenting low and comment often.
Even if it’s just to thank someone for a good comment or other low effort commenting, I like to think it helps.
We definitely need better onboarding. I am pushing for this on piefed via directs to newcomers@piefed.zip for new users to introduce themselves
I’m not a programmer so I can’t speak to how hard this is, but I think it would be a big asset to building user base if there was a neutral sign up website that wasn’t a specific instance. It would basically choose an instance for you automatically and skip that part. I figure there could be some list of general purpose instances compiled that are all fair game and the site would try to spread the load across instances.
Average user doesn’t care about federation, and all of that complexity is a big turn off. I know because I almost didn’t sign up myself because of that. Having to pick a team just to get in the door feels kinda bad.
- point people to one instance you like instead of a general website
- on Piefed, when people register, they can either join indeed the instance they’re on, or have a look at other options: https://piefed.zip/auth/instance_chooser
Incidentally Piefed have nice trend. https://piefed.fediverse.observer/stats&months=48
Having to explain federation is kind of the issue in my opinion. This idea wouldn’t be to remove the normal sign up process, it would be a way to side step it entirely for those who don’t care about the technology aspect of it and just want to be part of the community.
If you want to pick your own instance or suggest one, that would still exist. This would just be an alternative. It would also help to avoid everyone gravitating towards the largest instance, because it would try to load balance people automatically.
Having to explain federation is kind of the issue in my opinion.
I don’t, nowadays, I just point to piefed.zip
This would just be an alternative
The issue is that there aren’t really instances that are similar enough to be considered interchangeable. They all have their specificity, be it admin style, defederation, downvotes enabled or disabled, front-ends available, etc.
Yeah that’s a good point. Maybe it’s too different for it to work. I maintain that complexity will continue to push people away, though. If instances are that different we might have better luck referring to them as their own sites. That would just increase the flocking to single mega instances though. The most important feature of any social media site is who’s on it.
I was in the same boat as you regarding signing up. I also agree with you that the concept of federation might be confusing for new users. Just gave up at the promt to explore other instances (in lemmy.world sign up) and signed up to lemmy.world.
I ended up where I did because I wanted the closest thing to no instance possible, and the great folks running this one try to do just that. It’s fediverse Switzerland lol
You have a point but maybe the gatekeeping is a good thing?
Average user doesn’t care about federation would translate to the average user doesn’t care about this community. Maybe?
It’s like how some old forums would charge for an account. Kept a certain low effort person from signing up. Sure it might turn people off but if you do enough work to understand how to get in then there’s a level of buying into it that might make you care more.
Just some thoughts.
I would love to have more diversity here, so I’m afraid I don’t agree with that. 🤷♂️
It’s that live now for Piefed.social ?
Yep, it’s live.
I haven’t checked personally. Requires making new accounts to check each time
It should also fire when you manually make a user from the admin panel, if you want to test it out
https://chat.piefed.social/#narrow/channel/3-general/topic/Onboarding/near/7719
You’re an admin IIRC?
Staff. I don’t think I can do that. I can check later
Ah, I misremembered!
Ugh that’s a really good point. I need to work on more ‘whatever’ throw away comments
Thank you for your service. I agree with you on the issue, but am a bit afraid that if more people onboard here, the threads will be just the same reddit hivemind circlejerk like ”i also choose this guys wife” etc. But since there is no karma to gain here I wish it will stay like this.
I honestly found that one funny, and I don’t mind the funny comments either.
Still I get what you are saying about the problems.
It is funny indeed, but after a while I felt exhausted after reading the same repetitive threads over and over
Yep. I agree with this. Re-creating Reddit at the same scale just brings all the same problems. I like that federation means smaller more localised communities that can be connected (or not). I get that it’s not what everyone wants or is used to, and that’s okay.
The rules of the game are different so Lemmy wouldn’t be like Reddit even with the same scale.
Should aggregate number of Lemmy and Piefed users (and maybe Mbin, NodeBB too), and see if the graph looks very different then
If your model depends on users coming from lemmy, you’re going to run out of users just the same.
If we factor all these softwares in together, the user amount might be steady or even climbing upwards. While this curve in OP is currently going down.
last 2 years look pretty stable to me
Honestly, this is fine. This is a healthy community. If we had an exponential growth curve, the AI bots, clout-chasting influencers, marketers and data-mining scrapers would be all over these instances, and Lemmy frankly has very poor tools to deal with it.
There aren’t the niche communities, I agree that that’s regrettable. But we really do run into scaling problems.
There is a slow decline though. I don’t want exponential growth, but growth is important imo at this stage
The big answer to that is creating value on the site itself, no?
That always helps, but you can hardly advertise services like this outside of here.
This thread: “It’s because of all the assholes! Why, nearly everybody I meet here is an asshole!”
I knew it, I’m surrounded by assholes.
KEEP FIRING, ASSHOLES!
“This is a defamation, sir!”
Everyone who compares growth here (here being very relative considering how it works) vs. the idealized Reddit is forgetting something. Age. You don’t get peak Reddit by looking at its first years, and yet you’re looking at the literal first years for Lemmy and company and saying it’s not comparable. No, it’s not.
Doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be constant discussion on improving and growing communities for better discussion, but the whole “oh no, the numbers are low” is ridiculous. Aside from being a aggregated discussion format, this is like comparing apples and cars. Reddit shouldn’t be a goal or benchmark, discussion flow here should be. I’ll be more worried about stagnation when feed numbers for myself drop back to the first few months, where there was concern about if federation would even work well. (and improving federation/defederation is also a great topic to talk about, it isn’t perfect, but it’s far better than it was)
Reddit used fake accounts from the beginning.
If we want a real space it’s going to feel “dead” compared to that anyways.
So yea, I agree.
This is actually pretty good user retention. Most platforms bleed way more users after a surge in sign ups (eg Mastodon, Pixelfed, Threads, Bluesky).
they most likely went back to the original platforms they came on, reddit, X,tiktok.
Did Mastodon ever have users? Lol.
