Why? Are we not doing enough?

Honestly a lot of it is probably people getting comfortable lurking again, Lemmy only counts post and comments as active users

You should have seen Lemmy before June 2023. All posts were from the same five people. For now the community seems to be alive and healthy.

I exclusively surf "top 6 hours" and I've actually noticed an uptick in niche community content, lately. Different kind of growth, maybe a sort of settling into itself, finally.

It's very simple, most of the posts here are circle jerks (Linux, FOSS, boy howdy aren't we better than Reddit, communism) or rage bait.

I only come here when I'm having a good day and I want to reel myself in a bit

Edit: see below to see how far Lemmy users will go to circle jerk how much better they are than Reddit

Let's look at some numbers and do some napkin math:

Currently, the top post of Lemmy can usually get a little more than 2K upvotes, which puts Lemmy at about late 2010 to early 2011 reddit level of activity, which is right before reddit hits its explosive growth phase in 2012 with SOPA, Kony, and the Obama AMA. While active user count has been going down, the amount of post and comments have both been steadily going up.

You also have to realize that in more than a decade, there was never a reddit alternative that has EVER hit this level of activity. (unless you count 9gag or the_donald for some reason.)

It's worth noting that Lemmy only had around 1000 active users for the first half of 2023. (Kbin had fewer than 40 active users until May 2023!) Currently Lemmy + Kbin have about 38,000 active users.

That's the reality of where we are. A quiet rural village that turned into a boom town, and now is finding a new normal.

Social media as a whole is slowing down I think. People are starting to realize it makes them angry, sad, and annoyed.

I won't lie. I mostly don't engage with content I see here. I didn't do that when I was on Reddit either and mostly for the same reason: I don't really have much to say and, even when I do have an opinion, I don't usually want to engage in what's often a protracted debate about something that will probably just end up being frustrating.

That's not to say I haven't had positive experiences on the Fediverse - I've had more here than anywhere else - I'm just not particularly motivated most of the time.

Personnaly, I'm really enjoying it. You can interact without the Reddit toxicity. I miss a few specialized communities but I can live without it.

People had multiple accounts because servers were unstable. Now that stability has increased we're just abandoning the alts.

lemmy still isnt nearly as good as reddit was by a long shot. niche communities suck, porn sucks, c/all content isnt bad but if you scroll once youll just repeat everything on refresh.

but god damn the reddit app is terrible now and the content sucks there now too it literally feels like its trying to be a tik tok clone.

We need more idiots who can comment "this" on everything

I mostly lurk so this is me being proactive!

The quality here is far better with the exception of maybe some user generated text stories. Posts don't just get lost in a sea of posts. The users here may not be as many, but it appears to have more consistent engagement and far less people PM'ing me offering me Amazon gift cards for feet pics.

Lemmy is neither popular nor heavily advertised, so people join at a slow rate

On the other hand, the amount political discussions, Hexbear, and lack of content result in disinterested people leaving Lemmy and joining Reddit

So the user count is decreasing because Reddit refugees are leaving faster than new people are joining

Lemmy is cool and all but the amount of communist obsession here is a bit much.

Why does this matter? Do we need to appease the shareholders or something? Do we need endless month over month growth, lest the world completely stops turning?

Do we need SYNERGIES??!!!?

Less content, that is spread across multiple instances that can have duplicate communities.

You just can't keep doomscrolling here, the "active" search repeats all the time and the "best of the day" is like two pages.

And then there's specific communities that just... Stayed on Reddit.

Coulda fooled me, the content quality has continued to climb, and that's all that matters. Look at this post, it's an original meme only relevant to this community, and it's blowing up.

We should be more active to keep this ship afloat. Don't be stingy with the comments.

Edit: spelling

It really doesn't bother me tbh. The fediverse isn't for everyone and I'd rather people just use whatever platform they prefer than endlessly complaining on Lemmy when it's clearly simply not for them. And that's okay, use whatever platform suits you.

Maybe if every community wasn't just another Linux memes community we wouldn't have lost all of the users.

Told you guys this shit was gonna happen.

As someone who posts a ton, I've noticed that a lot of people seem to check the top posts once a day or so. Posts can be slow to get engagement and traction, but the ones that become super active still seem to hit similar peaks as before (1-2k upvotes, hundreds of comments).

But yeah, people aren't as actively engaged and commenting on everything all day like they used to on reddit. The framework is here, and I think if there were another big exodus, Lemmy is set up to be a great landing point.

It was better before people absolutely fucking insisted on scraping reddit posts to bring over here. Post after post after post of regurgitated bot posts, without a single comment, no engagement at all. Fun!

I see more people complaining on Lemmy about problems than I do the actual problems they're complaining about.

Just use the thing, and put the content and comments you want on it? You don't have to be a passive observer just staring out the window as monkeys dance for you. Be the monkey. Dance how you want. Eat a banana. Fling poo if that's what you want. Just stop expecting everyone else to create your dream routine and then having a sook because they step-pause-turn-pause-pivot-step-paused when you wanted them to step-pause-turn-pause-pivot-step-step.

I prefer social media not based on addiction. Lemmy has been much better for my lifestyle, than my reddit addiction.

I'm one of the people who has stopped coming here. I'll keep visiting occasionally but the lack of content and pro-east/anti-west rhetoric is just as irritating as the maga/conspiracy crowds on reddit.

I am still on Lemmy. It's still my primary timewaster. I was clean from Reddit until a few weeks ago and I relapsed. The app is shit. Lemmy feels more like what I loved about Reddit but without the content. Reddit still has content but the app doesn't feel good to use.I m stuck going back and forth. First to Lemmy then to Reddit. I'll stick with Lemmy until it gets better or it dies.

tbh its true: apart from my french instance where i like to hang out, most of Lemmy is just memes, Linux related posts, or self hosting posts. No meaningful content for ur average person really. In fact i scroll throu 'All' in new and reach yesterday's posts in just few minutes, given the amount of 'not so meaningful content' i am filtering ..

Yeah I lurk most of the time and comment on neutral topics sometimes, but generally the content isn't too engaging.

It's either memes, Linux (or memes about Linux), or this or that type of politics. Lots of bot-generated content, too many American-based sports teams; lots of repeating topic content (e.g. shitload of musk, trump/biden/whatever), lots of community and/or news duplicates. I won't be lying I've seen like 5 reposts of some amd threadripper news in my active feed within 10 pages.

Sometimes I know that engaging into a small comment will yield zero replies, and other times I feel like the response will most likely be frustrating. What I valued about reddit is diverse topic discussions, interesting questions and fun reads. But people seem to have more fun bypassing my anti-politics filters in-between porn. I honestly think we need to revive many communities related to questions, interesting topics, and overall "lets-have-a-chat-on-something" (preferably not related to what I mentioned above, or at least that touches a broader audience).

Do I contribute a lot? Am I the one to tell people what to do? I don't think so, but when I have a will to create some content, that will is usually cut off by zero-to-none expected engagement from other people. People wanna do what they wanna do, I guess. I don't blame em.

idk, I'm not going anywhere

I love it here

There are too many dimwits who think Lemmy was made so that they can build their echo chambers. So, there is no discourse, just stupid people encouraging stupid people. Anyone that comments otherwise is immediately removed.

Most mods are dumdums. Most are obviously politically and ideologically motivated. It's their job to prune anything they disagree with, which means they can't help themselves and ban everyone. Most of the time it's a complete waste of time to comment in smaller subs. The dumdums have taken hold either by making the subs and controlling them, or by volunteering as mods with no oversight.

In the early days of Reddit it's motto was fake it until you make it. It was a ghost town so they set up an army of bots to generate content and fake activity. Not much has changed tbh.

Lemmy tickles the same part of my brain without all the corporate bs - less content makes me scroll less, but less toxicity makes it worth it

I feel like Ive found my people and I ain't leaving

People are leaving lemmy because of the quality of the apps

They are used to using a terrible app that often breaks and spams you with notifications of random posts

Tbf, I have like 7 accounts and I'm currently only using 2 or 3 since Lemmy servers are much more stable than they used to be

Happened with Mastodon too, but that's thriving now. Users come in waves. Don't focus on the numbers, focus on the content.

Maybe it’s because nobody is interested in a platform that has a worse circlejerk than even Reddit of all sites?

I want Lemmy to succeed but we need to attract more normies and at the right time when Reddit does something stupid again.

Feels Very circle jerky here. Its low effort commentaries on political issues mostly and extraordinarily little growth of niche interest subs. The lack of content here helps curb my doom scrolling, so that and a real hate for reddit leadership and the pathetic Simps that think writing "fuck Spez" while still contributing content to his network for free is a form of effective protest, are all that keeps me here though.

i love lemmy,

as a realist, allowing porn would do wonders ngl

I like turtles. Can we have more turtle-centric content?

oh my god who cares

I find this all very irrelevant. I deleted reddit, account and all, and have never felt better. If I need to tell you you're great more to keep people here, then I will.

Hey, you're great!

Thanks.

I have no intention of leaving

I’ll throw in a few reasons

-Learning curve is huge compared to other social media

-As soon as an instance gets a large audience hosting costs skyrocket and moderation ability plummets

-The same instance can exist on multiple servers causing the demographic to be split

-Pr0n instances have to take the colossal risk of hosting malicious material that can send them to jail because the data is hosted on their own server

For me personally, I have less connection to specific subs than back in the reddit days, given its federated nature and all that. I enjoy scrolling through the homepage, but don't really have that specific moment of 'I thought of something nice! That would fit nicely into this one, specific subreddit!'

Which, don't get me wrong, can be a good thing in the long run. But it takes a bit of getting used to.

Lemmy was nice at first but the communities now are really unfriendly, there is 0 motivation to create content

It was always bound to happen after a massive user gain. Frankly, we should be quite happy we can get over 400 comments in a thread. That’s not insubstantial for a very niche platform.

The people who don't want to stick with Lemmy are the people we don't want on Lemmy.

I see this as a win.

A comment to show I'm here!

I moved to Lemmy over from reddit not because of content or better UI but because people behind reddit seems like jerks to me and i came to realization I'd rather use open source.
What i lack here is information e.g. programming communities in Lemmy are, well, dead. If left on Lemmy things that are "recommended" to me it's sensational "news" that are aimed to spark woke vs others battle in discussion.

So what to make better ?

to build what reddit has, I'd call it a content library and i don't care if it's done by bots or humans. For me the facts + discussion to ask question is super important.
if searching for a topic outside of Lemmy> Lemmy doesn't show up in search engine but reddit does. Some optimization needs to be done to get better score at search engines.
let users to block instances and thus make de-federation to user's decision.
i think there needs to some kind of cross instance community, i don't think having same kind of community in multiple instances with different content is good solution.

AreYouNotEntertained.gif

i don't care. I came here because i'm so sick of reddit.

All the people constantly complaining about "tankies" and "commies": You are the problem. Normal people are repulsed by that shit. The only reason you don't see more pushback against it is because nobody wants to get inundated with pedo-nazis trying to draw them into a debate where they're either forced to side with literal nazis or the worst strawmen of socialism that they can think up, where if they back down or stand up for their values at any point, they get targeted for harassment. I deal with that shit regularly because I'm built for it. Most people aren't.

There is no way in the fucking world someone is going to ask me to feel bad about a social media platform failing in 2023. Like, get fucked.

Give it time.

I would be on here more if you could block entire instances. If its possible at this point, its not as straight forward as mastodon.

I’ve stopped posting in a few communities due to user interaction. Some are just asses, some want this to be Reddit 2.0.

Well, Lemmy is really not good at pushing new content/new posts and/or new communities to people. For many of us, that might be a boon: less algorithmic shenanigans, less "steering" of the user. Yet, if you are not a user who likes to actively seak out stuff, your feeds will look stale and slow-paced very quickly. There might be new stuff,.but the feeds struggle to find a middle ground between "only the upvoted stiff you subscribed to", "the always same server wide top posts" and "bleeding edge new stuff". It's also very reluctant to sprinkle on new communities.

I think that's a main contributor to the decline.

For the record: kbin is more liberal when it comes to that sort of stuff. So if you like a more active feed, you might want to try kbin. If you like your feed to be controlled by you more, use Lemmy.

I begrudgingly installed the Reddit app yesterday as I missed the content.

I think I gave cold turkey lemmy only long enough to give it a fair chance at filling that gap but now I browse both again now :/

How can we grow lemmy? I would honestly interact here a lot more if we had an active ML community like reddit or twitter.

But since it is a small community, maybe we can do interactive things more often?

Wtf is Misskey?

Because this place sucks if you're not an edgelord or looking for anime porn.

Do we have stats so we can compare dates of drops in active users against defederation events? Every time a major instance defederates I resist the strong urge to abandon the defediverse.