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
You must log in or # to comment.
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.
Just wait and let Reddit have another controversy
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.
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.
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
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.
Just talk up Lemmy, the issue is most people doesn’t realize there’s another option to the popular toxic trash fires.
…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’m a very new user who wanted to give this a chance, here are the friction points from my point of view:
- The onboarding is way too complicated for the average user. A huge part of this is that there are 100 ways to do it. Before you even can start to do anything you have to investigate and then decide on what and how to do it. And even then there is no guidance at all, you are given options and then you can either go and do some research again or try them one by one. You lose at least 90% of the users here already. It doesn’t help that fediverse users try to downplay this issue.
- Content discovery sucks ass. My feed stayed mostly the same since I started using Lemmy. I’m presented the same shit over and over again. I’m not sure if it’s something that I do wrong, if there is just no content or if that’s a side effect of ‘no tracking at all’ but either way the experience is just bad
- Someone in here already said it, but ‘Lemmy’ is a horrendous name. That alone was the reason why I didn’t bother to try it at all for a long time. Only recent events pushed me towards it but tbh I’m not sure I’ll stay.
In short the user experience is abysmal.
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.
I’ve seen too many of it. You can see how I rarely visit this website nowadays if you see my last activities. This is the main reason, things like this are where I put the line
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
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.
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.
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”.
deleted by creator
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 [email protected] , 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 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’ll commit to commenting more. I prefer to lurk, but the fediverse needs me 🤣
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.
