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

So glad I decided to stop lurking and actually start participating right as the whole fediverse dies out, it's not just lemmy.
- I find it more comfortable to contribute to Lemmy than to other sites. There seems to be actual discussion and opportunities to learn, which can be much harder to come across on the other platforms.
- Definitely trying to interact more, Lemmy is a gift imo.
- I feel like mastodon is doing alright.
- The fediverse is not dying out, don't be dramatic.
- For me Mastodon is still growing and getting more interesting, with more and more formal institutions joining (newspapers, NGOs, government institutions etc.).
Time to step out of the shadows then 🤭
- I'm doing my part!
Commenting so I‘m active :)
- I don't know how long it counts it for, but I try to remember to comment something like once every two weeks or something
Me no lurk. Me comment.
I'm doing my part!
My comment to stop the lurk
Ok I am guilty of that. What about votes? Are they not counted as activity?
I’ll try to post atleast one comment every now and then.
Well in that case, ping!
Well, as they say: “I’m going my part”.
I try to make it a point to post questions on communities that have not kicked off yet, knowing that I most likely will not receive a response for a while.
Yeah, that's probably the case.
Really? Oh
Time to count me back in!
Well count me in now

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 wonder if those same five people are sad, presumably because their posts aren't as popular.
- No, we are sad because the decrease in posts lately have left behind the worst parts of reddit.
Yep, I'm jaded in my expectations knowing what Lemmy was prior to the massive expansion through June and July...
It was still a fun place, but it was a couple dozen posts a day across all servers, by a handful of people from the bigger servers.
We still have a lot of fixes to make on Lemmy, especially on the moderation, management, and content filtering side of things (though apps have been thankfully filling the gaps on some of these issues). Niche communities still need more participation to get off the ground. I'll see again where we are in a few months from now.
Real

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.

If everyone is browsing by top-6-hour I think we need to rethink the sorting of things.
- Oh yeah, the sort here kind of sucks. Also just using the site, you lose your place/sort if you click into a link or the comments. Like, if I'm on page 2 of Top 6 Hours, click a link, and then click back into the scroll.. pretty sure I just see the first page of Active again until I either refresh or change pages.
  That could definitely be improved as well.
- Lemmy sorting has shit ever since there was enough content here to make sorting necessary. It's been five months and it hasn't been fixed.
  Lemmy desperately needs a fork.
I sort by New. Bring it all on.
- I subscribed to the communities I care the most about and sort by subscribed and new. That said, across 20 communities it's probably something like 10-15 new posts per day so after I get through those and interact it's off to all.
  But I do try to engage in the communities I want to see grow.
- New gets... Weird
That's all I scroll as well. It's not a bad experience over all
Bro, I noticed the same, it has been a long time since I played around with the sort types, I basically settled with Active and hid all seen stuff, now I feel I get different content with other kinds of sorts.

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

Yeah the "All" in particular is pretty bad for the average person. They're not going to enjoy a Star Trek meme, followed by a Arch meme, a Self-hosted post, a grad-student Science meme, followed by a privacy post.
I'm also convinced Lemmy's "hot" algorithm is broken; I can easily find posts with ONE UPVOTE on the all feed. Hot is supposed to be a balance between acceleration and total vote count, but it seems like it just only acceleration. Go look at the front page of reddit. The difference is night and day.
We need a normie.world that has an "all" feed that doesn't contain 70% niche communities. We have c/humor, c/news, etc but they're completely diluted by overpowered niche posts.
- I have a potentially contentious opinion. Normies are what ruined Reddit and the crowd attracted by normie communities are why Reddit is even more toxic than it used to be.
  We don't need to attract normies, we just need to attract more people like us.
  I don't hate normies by any means, but I don't want to hang out with them all day either.
- Also a weirdly large amount of "death to America" and whatnot.
- Don't forget firefox
- While I don't entirely disagree, I'm a little confused by your description of the front page of lemm.ee, which we're both on. My front page when viewing All here is mostly memes/shitposts/news/technology when set to Active sort, is yours not?
  I've admittedly blocked a fair amount and have show NSFW/bot posts disabled, but the communities you mention aren't affected by that.
- We need a normie.world
  It's called reddit and that's why I left. Fuck the normies. They'll import fascism.
  That sounds unnecessarily combative so let me expand my argument.
  There's a book called The Authoritarians by a man called Bob Altermyer. Altermyer is now retired but he was a professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba. During his career he did a lot of research into authoritarians, both followers and leaders. In the book he describes for laypeople the experiments and the findings. If you want to do a deep dive into his statistical analysis you can because the whole thing is fully referenced but for people who just want an easy to read description that is also easy to understand then this is the book for you.
  After reading the book redditors behaviour became a lot more easy to understand. I was less upset by what was going on but I stopped engaging because I now understood that reddit wasn't a site for me anymore. It was a site for people that enjoyed being normal and doing normal things. And that's ok, why shouldn't they be catered for?
  I use reddit and lemmy exclusively on desktop or laptop. So when the app business came up I didn't regard it as my fight, however I thought that if I expected people to stand up for my interests if they are challenged I should show a bit of solidarity with them. So I didn't visit reddit at all for the days it was blacked out. I didn't like how spez reacted. I saw that people were crossing to the fediverse and I took a look for myself. I liked it. I posted. I wasn't attacked for having a non-normie viewpoint. I liked that a lot.
  The thing about normies is they don't read scientific studies for fun, they don't like long winded explanations about why the world is the way it is. They think they can see something in the street and extrapolate an entire social policy from it and there are chancers that will tell them, 'You know what? You're right. We don't need experts telling you that you're wrong, what do they know?'
  So your Jordan Petersons and your Nigel Farages and Alex whatever his nameis, these people and reddit's normie audience are made for each other. I'll even go as far as to say this extends to the people that think the Democrats or the Labour Party are going to fix their problems, Team Liberal aren't doing themselves any favours but my point is that if your goal is a massive website that caters to the largest part of the reddit audience you're going to end up swimming in cryptofascist and sometimes outright fascist content. Been there, seen that, got the t-shirt.
That's not lemmy, that's all social media (albite divisive topics are a bit different among different communities).
This is a hot take, but I think humanity is slowly turning it's back on social media because of it's toxic nature. You can only open a browser and get your nuts kicked so many times before you finally decide you don't like getting your nuts kicked.
- humanity is slowly turning it's back on social media
  Are you living in a parallel universe or something? Are we talking for the same humanity that is 24/7 on Instagram and on tiktok?
  I really wish you're right but I'm afraid that the minorities you may know who just abandoned Facebook are not representing humanity
The echo chamber is as bad as reddit but less diverse and smaller. Sometimes it's really painful.
Isn't Lemmy suposed to be FOSS? I thought that was the main reason why people left Reddit for Lemmy was that and API changes. Wouldn´t other FOSS be of interestt too? Just a thought.
- Reddit's great strength was that it was big enough that niche communities could attract enough users to have interesting conversations and a steady flow of content, and if you are a Reddit refugee looking for those sorts of communities you aren't likely to find them on Lemmy. I've more or less made my peace with that, but if you're not the kind to stand on principle, a falling user count is bad news for the hope that the Fediverse might snowball into the sort of place that can support discussions about your passions and hobbies even if they're not the sort of thing that is popular with a specific set of tech-savvy anti-capitalist leftwing activists (and I say this with love as a fellow tech-savvy leftie... but y'all got one-track minds and it shows in what communities live and die around here).
Hey don't forget about the other half of the posts, which are in a language you don't understand. Seriously, my block list is long because language settings here mean nothing, and while I'm sure that's quality content, uh, I can't understand it.
Fuck yes.
Good days are good!

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.)

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.
That is a very important point that doesn't get mentioned enough. Lemmy is the largest and most active reddit alternative around. All the other sites that tried to capitalize on the API disaster have laughable numbers of users and most posts rarely have more than 10 votes or interactions.
- How's kbin doing? Granted they federate with Lemmy so it's like asking about an instance. But not quite the same
i am hopeful still. and i prefer this to be quieter and hence, safer, honestly. personally, i am not an active user because i'm the type of person that feels shame just for existing, but internet is helping me socialize. still not to the point of having something useful to say without wanting to delete it immediatly, but when i see these posts, i automatically get strenght to give my support. i am not able to maintain a community, be a mod, i don't know how to code, i just can post supportive messages or be a helpful user adding resources and so. but i should be doing more, yep. i am ashamed of posting, but not contributing probably would be more shameful haha sorry people... hehe
That is a very astute observation, and I would not worry about the temporary decline for this very reason.
Also, looking at your username.. ”can somebody please find Margot Robbie so that I can make sense of all this”
- That's esteemed Academy Award nominated character actress Margot Robbie to you!
lol forgot about fucking KONY
wonder what that ol' fella is up to these days!
(is he dead? he's dead isn't he?)

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.

I never even new lemmy existed until the reddixit and I never went back because I think lemmy is a lot less toxic. Also worth pointing out that this post alone has more than 800 likes When I firsf came around top posts had 100 likes tops
for what it's worth, it's a small active community. Those that stay participate, like a pre-Eternal September internet. I've seen memes here before they made it to reddit, that's a shift in "power" that can't be understated in the landscape of the internets.
- I think "the good ending" looks something like that.
  We aren't beholden to stockholders, so we don't need perpetual growth. We aren't driven by an egomaniacal CEO so we don't need to be the biggest social network around. We just need to find our equilibrium.
There's some of us!
Exactly. There's nothing out of the ordinary in that chart, just a quick growth, that led to an overshoot, and now it's stabilizing In the next months, we will probably see a more stable pattern of linear-looking growth, with occasional peaks here and there.

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

I'm doing the least social media I've done since Facebook became a thing and now I realize that without those emotions I'm just kind of bored.
- *boring
Internet in general is becoming boring and tedious. Don't know if it's because of my age (Started to use internet when I was 13yo now I'm 31) but the internet isn't that exciting and curiosity inducing place to me.
- Have you continued exploring, or found yourself settling in more?
  For me any place stagnates when I start settling into it, so I try to find a new angle, a new question to ask of it, and eventually something gives way to something exciting and fascinating that was right around the corner the whole time.
I literally bought a Lightphone II because I was spending too much time on reddit. Like, I'd stay in bed for an hour just scrolling.
I've recently slacked off and started keeping my iPhone (on wifi) next to me when I sleep. I loose interest in like 20 minutes.
I've made a point of not posting or commenting on reddit since the recent debacle, but it's really frustrating when I have some OC that would be great for a niche community that just doesn't exist in any real numbers on lemmy.
like Playdate dev or Framework laptop.
Good god, I sure hope so.

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.

Well, I want to thank you for sharing your thoughts.
There are a number of thread topics on Lemmy that seem to keep going the same direction (Google, Musk, Gaza, Trump, Windows, etc.), and as you say, it can be frustrating and exhausting...
At the same tine on Lemmy, I had found articles that were worthwhile reading, updates to FOSS that I would have otherwise missed, no shortage of silly memes, and a handful of new perspectives that were positively thought provoking. Those let me look past most of the negative things and stuff that is pervasive on all kinds of forums, Reddit and social media on the whole.
I do most of my discourse on Beehaw which is protected in many ways. When I used reddit I would often have a comment typed out ready to post and think better of it since I knew it would only drive dismissive and antagonistic responses of the stupidest kind. It may be because of the protections or it may be because of the smaller community but I find a lot less posturing and a lot more actual conversation since I’ve been using this platform. This is what keeps me here rather than reddit. It might be worth engaging in conversations you wouldn’t have on reddit when you’re interested.
- I agree... Beehaw is such a wonderful and special place on the internet. I have an account there but I try to keep it separate from my main Lemmy.ca one so that I better hold myself accountable to the server rules, in order to foster nicer discourse.
I'll happily participate with light-hearted content but otherwise I mostly feel like you when it comes to any polarising topics like politics, etc. I wish there were more content about my areas of expertise so I could participate in that but alas there's mostly developer stuff only. Maybe I'm also not doing my best curating my feed since I tend to mostly browse all.

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.

The behavior is describe as toxic definitely still exists here, and it's worse because the morons tend to get up voted by other morons.
- Yup, Lemmy is just as toxic if not more on some aspects
Yeah Reddit just sucks now. I don't care much about karma, but it can be discouraging to type out a long answer to help someone and just get a downvote with no comment or anything. Over and over again.
The influx of people who don't know how the site is supposed to work, on top of the usual toxicity, has just ruined it for me.

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

Can confirm.
Absolutely the case for me, I had like 5-6 alts, now I use maybe two.
Yep, can confirm. Over the last couple of week I closed 20.000 alts.
- the average lemmy user has 3 alts factoid is just statistical error. the average lemmy user has 0 alts. alts georg, who lives on linux.community apparently and has 20,000 alts, is a statistical outlier adn should not be counted
Yeah, "monthly active users" does not necessarily mean "unique monthly active users".
I would much rather see activity statistics like posts+comments or something like that. As long as those are looking good, then new unique users will continue to join gradually.

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

I completely disagree. What this place needs is a bunch of bot accounts that endlessly spam the top comments from when whatever's posted was on the front page last week.
Or the week before that I guess..
- This!
- Gonna build spezify_bot which will do that, copy over comments and comment "this" and "finally someone said it!" below the top comments. Maybe even some "I came here to say this, too!" at some points?
This
- i second this
This
This
This
this.
- I'm sure it won't just be anot- why, you little scamp!
this
this
dis
And my axe!
+1
Thizz
I, too, choose this guy's wife.

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.

Since the fall of reddit, I feel like I don't know how to internet anymore.
- I miss the good ol' days when everyone on the planet was free to make their own unique websites using JavaScript and HTML. Now all we have is google twitter tiktok instagram LinkedIn
And when reddit was at its best, it took years to gather those user numbers. I just dont understand why people keep missing this point.
- Lemmy isn't on an upwards trend.
Quit porn
- this is a crazy take to make from my comment but i respect ur grind ig
  but no, porn and jerking off is good for you abstaining has no benefits and never will. and i can confirm im much healthier and far more shredded than youll ever be.
Pro-tip: sort All by New Comments. Yes, if you refresh, you get repeat content, but you also find the unusual stuff and the repeated stuff is where the conversations are happening.

I mostly lurk so this is me being proactive!

I also mostly lurk, but I logged in to post now. I don't think the goal should be too be as big as possible, but a place of better discussions.
- Currently imagining a community that is only a place for lurkers to post in.
I'm doing my part!
(starship troopers.jpg)

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.

This really is a nice place. Even most engaged posts hardly get over 50 comments usually, but 48 of those comments are on topic, sane and unique even on a fandom community. Arguments are heated but mostly contribute at least some point of view rather than being rabid spoutings that either get upvoted (or awarded) to skies above or downvoted to hell unanimously.
We have way fewer posts, even fewer do in niche communities. However, the posts on the bigger communities are quite enough to pass the time. What we actually need is more people interacting with the seemingly dead niche communities of their fandoms and interests.
Big communities keep crossposting a lot of daily news or magazine-worth happenings, which kinda gets tiring after seeing the same post for the 5th time. Hiding crossposts per user settings would be nice to prevent the feeling of only same posts being posted for interested non-fediverse users.
Agreed. I do miss my niche subreddits like druggardening, centuryhomes, unclebens, and diyprint.
- 3d printing is one of the things that's pretty popular on Lemmy, actually.
If you missed them maybe you can persuade those wikifeet contributors to join your lemmy instance.
- NO. NO FEET PICS. BAD.
I swear that was the best part of reddit.... When I was alone there was always someone to offer me gift cards for 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

- If that's not your jam go to your ad filled corpo hellscape and talk to bots 🤷‍♂️
If people left Reddit and then went back, then they are just proving to spez that they are the addicts he thinks they are and is counting on abusing. No thanks. Fuck Reddit.
- Reddit has actually gotten a lot better since the Exodus. All the political activists have come here.

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

It was founded by a Communist, and decentralization appeals to leftists. The non-Communist lemmy is Reddit, basically, or making your own instance or finding an anti-Communist instance.

And the Linux/Firefox/Windows hating/Open source obsessions
Same, there's this political circlejerk everywhere I go here, I may agree with a lot of people here, but different POVs on politics would be refreshing...

That's not very revolutionary of you, comrade
Marexist obsession

Wait lemmy is full of tankies? Fuck.... When I left reddit and twitter, i thought i would never have to see the terminally online left again.
Oh, and before the leftists come at me, I hate conservatives more, and yall need to admit that joe biden is doing a great job and exactly what you asked.
There's a lot on lemmy that's too much, this isn't really a surprise

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.

I actually like lemmy for the fact I can't doom scroll Makes it easier to put down and touch grass
- Yep, it's been a massive improvement for me over Reddit on that end. No more doomscrolling, no more literally endless fights with strangers (still some ofc, but grass touching is back on the menu).
- Well, perhaps that is healthier.
  But it doesn't trap eyeballs.
Less content, that is spread across multiple instances that can have duplicate communities.
on top of that, there redundant communities that are unnecessary even in the same instances. For example there is the android@ and the askandroid@. The first one has a decent amount of subscribers while the second one has a single digit number. I wanted to ask a question, I posted in the first one since it would make sense to reach more people. The post got deleted and I was told to go to the other one. In the first one they were posting only news articles.
This is ridiculous. Splitting communities in such way was the result of the huge traffic that such communities had in the past in other platforms. This makes sense only when the traffic is so huge that it is practically chaotic to navigate and moderate between news/articles and support questions. When both communities combined have 50 subscribers, such split only harms the platform and the users.
Everyone wanted to migrate by bringing an identical environment to what they had used to. However this should be adaptable to the current situation instead of directly copying it.
- I think some people expected their entire community to get up and move.
It's not just that. Most people here are into far left, anti-capitalist bs and people don't care to deal with that
- I like it here because of the far left anti-capitalist bs. The internet is full of edgy incel nazis and it’s pretty relieving to have some safe spaces 🤷‍♂️
- People clearly support that, and it makes sense, considering Lemmy's founder is a Communist and decentralization appeals to Leftists.
I actually found that I really like the "hot" scrolling so much better. On Reddit, everything I came across had ~hundreds of comments and everything was multiple hours old. I didn't feel like I could contribute at all. But here... it feels a lot smaller, and most of the "hot" posts are not rubbish, so I feel like I can actually contribute!
- Well for me, the real content of Reddit was finding an interesting thing and then reading a few dozen comments from people really in the know.
  Here it's going to be a dozen top-level comments and maybe one of them will have a thread longer than three messages.

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.

I get a bit annoyed with a hit meme being reposted 5+ times across instances, it clogs the main feed with repetition and only artificially increases the post numbers while making the whole experience less good. I did enjoy the comment-stacking meme yesterday where everyone added their own take. There are a few news-posting bots that post the exact same articles and cause the clogging repetitive main feed that makes the app far less interesting as well. It gets a bit depressing seeing the same inflammatory headlines 3-4 times, ie "35 blind fingerless coal-mining orphans bombed in Gaza strip hospital, why isn't Joe Biden doing anything?" While reporting is important, the repetition of some themes seems astroturf-y. I also get really annoyed with the bots posting NSFW/ extremely explicit sex content/ads on main feeds. I have been here less because of these things.

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.

The whole "populist" mindset of modern social media is trash anyway. I miss the age of forums and boards instead of monolithic megacorp run social media
It's actually a good thing. We are all chaff here.
- No... we're the wheat!

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.

There are plenty of other communities people made, just most didn't become very active. If the Linux memes are everywhere, it's because those are the people actually active here
- It's not that they're not active, it's that every single thread on every single community devolves into linux discussions even if the community isn't in any way supposed to be about Linux.
  Also the ones that aren't active aren't active because everyone realized lemmy only caters to like three interests.
  We need better moderation so that the communities which are supposed to be about Linux are, and the ones that aren't don't get flooded with it. That way newcomers won't feel like they have no place here unless they're an anti-car, vegan, FOSS user.
  If this doesn't happen, lemmy will slowly die and people will have to go to other places like Tildes or back to Reddit.
Yeah reddit spring user here, I kinda agree. Not that I mind them but there is an awful lot of 'LOL WINDOWS NORMIES LOL' and 'JOKE ABOUT HOW HARD THIS LINUX IS.' is like... allot of the jokes.
A lot of the problems with Linux are the same problems Lemmy has, so it's a really good point.
Do you have a few minutes to talk about our Lord and Saviour, Linus Torvalds?
- I use Linux, I just hate Linux users.
- Personally I only worship Saint IGNUcius https://stallman.org/saint.html
  Oh and Satan, I also worship Satan.

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.

But on the other hand reddits comments were frequently shallow and full of annoying jokes. I love reading Lemmy!
- This. Quality over quantity. There are much more walls of text, but it's filled with information and humanity. Reddit just became another Meta platform, but for niches. Lemmy has great communities, but all are tech and anti-big-corpo related, I feel right at home :p, but I understand that most don't.
- Pun threads on Reddit are the worst. I thought they were funny and clever... In 2009...
- [I got a bot to automatically delete all my comments over 1 month old so you can't see this comment anymore]

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!

And then you find the same post on FIVE separate communities! Fun²
- But but but... I want the little offshoot niche community to grow! I also want content to get seen by more than 5 people.
  In reality there just isn't the user mass to make small/niche communities viable right now, so you see more general communities filling the void.
  An easy example is 3D printing. There are two 3D printing communities in the lemmyverse. There's also a 'fix my print' community that's a ghost town and a few printer specific communities that are also ghost towns. Posts in these more specialized communities tend to get a consistent level of votes, but very few comments.
  I've intentionally been trying to seed more content, but it's hard without literally posting the same thing in two spots.
- I do wonder what the solution to this problem even looks like. Cuz I agree issa problem
I don't see those. I think some instances have defederated from the worst offenders.
I wish we could not have those
- You can easily block them
- I follow one for news articles. I don't need nor want the comments. I also follow several news communities from lemmy; just a way for me to aggregate.

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.

So true, lemmy provides me with just enough stuff to feel like I saw enough memes, got some news, etc. but then I can just put it down and do other stuff. My interneting / doomscrolling is waaay lower than it was before.
this is an excellent point. perhaps the slowness of the content here is helping those of us who've been on reddit forever and are used to just doom scrolling through endless content.
i spend less time here but I feel I get more direct 'value' when I do. it's more small business feel than condy nast breathing margins down the user community's throats(pre and post gold eras)
I quit the R word cold turkey re: API and now toggle between this and kbin but lemmy with eternity app has been the best baconreader withdrawal breaker for me.
to the fediverse and beyond!
- Yep! Great points!
  Another big point is that it's a rejection of the profit motive, ie there's not even a "small business" feeling like you say for me, but a far more genuine feeling. Nobody has tried to sell me anything here yet.

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.

Okay. But you’re here. So … what?
Yeah... I've also never watched star trek, or used Linux, or had Firefox and browsing is all that.
- I've done all of those but none of them are interests of mine. I like the odd reference but linux is an OS.... it doesn't get more boring than that for me.
Do you visit here/Reddit for some news alongside other stuff, or more other stuff than news?
If the latter, you can somewhat avoid the rhetoric back & forth by blocking out a lot of the news communities, but then you do run into the general content problem more (especially if you're also blocking memes).
- I've been looking for more specific subjects now but generally I just browse active/top/hot all. Reddit is getting really bad...
Large portions of Lemmy feel similar to places like /r/sino on Reddit. Personally I like to look at that stuff from time to time just to keep tabs on that flavor of propaganda, but it's pretty detached from reality.

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.

When I don't feel satisfied with Lemmy I try to go back to Reddit too, but I was so mad at them a couple weeks ago I uninstalled their app and now when I tried to install the app, they give me a list of my former BANNED usernames as an "option" to log in but they offer no option to log in under any of my VALID usernames. (Yes I do have some accounts that haven't been banned but they won't let me login to my good ones.)
The only options they give me are to sign in with Google or a previous banned account. They clearly don't want me there. which is probably a good thing because this evening I went to the gym instead of wasting time on this... What should we call it... discussion format?

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 ..

idk, I'm not going anywhere

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.

My god, the amount of Trump shit I see on here is insane. I despise the cunt, but god damn do I really need to scroll past like 15 posts a day about the shit stain? Even on Reddit they didn't suck his cheeto dick so much
I won't be lying I've seen like 5 reposts of some amd threadripper news in my active feed within 10 pages.
It's true and one of the pitfalls of the de-centralized model. As a poster I try to crosspost the same link across servers to multiple communities big and small, as a way for people to "discover" niche communities.
I'm in full agreement on how there should be more laid back "chat about something" content. You might interested in having a look at https://beehaw.org (not federated with LW or SJW), that has !chat@beehaw.org and that server might be more your speed, I personally like it a lot. Bee sure to read and follow the spirit of the server rules.
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).
Have you subbed to the various AskLemmy/Ask[instance]/NoStupidQuestions/Out of the Loop communities across here?
To my own amusement, I found sh.itjust.works has several question communities that I tossed some posts to here & there.
Think they were:
!askshit@sh.itjust.works
!randomquestions@sh.itjust.works
And of course, the obligatory:
!asklemmy@sh.itjust.works
But besides those and the big AskLemmy communities on World and Lemmy.ml, there's:
!nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
!nostupidquestions@lemmy.ca
!outoftheloop@lemmy.world
Also although I haven't sorted out what I might want to post in them, there's these chat communities for other discussing other topics besides those you highlight getting plenty enough discussion:
!casualconversation@lemmy.world
!chatter@lemmy.ca
!chat@beehaw.org
!general@lemmy.world

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.

Last week there was a woke-not-woke argument in certain StarTrek post that was like one quite moderate guy against 1000 angry people. At least in reddit there was some debate posible and it was respectful for the most part, here you get dilapidated before even be able to explain yourself. Lemmy is too politically driven as you said. And that's insufferable.
- Six months ago lemmy was infinitely better than reddit in that regard. It's gotten worse because people from Reddit are here now, and brought their idiocy with them.
Like in real life, the people wanting to be in charge are usually the people who should not be in charge.
You have been banned from c/pyongyang

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

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.

It's just now scam artists and annoying people who have taken over the bot market
The subreddit simulator must date from the late stages of that era

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

Oh I hadn't even thought of that. I have two accounts because when I started using Boost for Lemmy, my home instance wasn't supported, so I signed up for startrek.website.
My old account would appear to be an inactive user in the numbers, which is not really accurate. But also it means that bump in users that happened during the reddit exodus was partially driven by duplicate sign ups.

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.

This is my take on Lemmy as well. I was impacted by the removal of third party apps because I used Reddit as a mobile quick reader between activities where the bite-sized format of title -> elaboration -> brief discussion was great, but maybe a little too much. On Lemmy I don’t feel the need to keep reading. This also means I wasn’t invested enough in Reddit, so when they made clear their disdain for the users, I simply left. Nothing there is important enough to keep going.
Lemmy is definitely lower quality though. All is primarily single topic outrage and there is a significant amount of extreme rhetoric that makes me feel like I’ll be put on a list for reading, which would have been removed on Reddit for lack of civility or worse. The niche things don’t exist and, even if I wasn’t a bite-sized mobile user and had the time or thoughts to form a community, these Reddit clones are always most active at political… discussion users can’t express elsewhere and that tends to kill the niche hobbyists who don’t want to look at or be surrounded by that type of passion. So it’s difficult to curate a personal feed of anything but that.
Lemmy still works for my use case and it’s about the next best thing to Reddit. I do think the “circlejerk” feeling is contributing to the decline though, and wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up like Voat.

i love lemmy,

as a realist, allowing porn would do wonders ngl

What? There already is porn. A lot of it.
- Depends on the instance.
I joined a porn instance to fill the gap and trust me, you're not missing out on anything

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

I know your joking, but can i hijack your comment a bit. Your comment kind of reflects my thoughts when i joined Lemmy.
I like Perth, so I made that my 'thing' to contribute to Lemmy. So I echo the other commentor, "be the change", and have a 'thing' that you do here.
It's helped me stay way more engaged, and have way more fun on here than I ever did on Reddit. If it's turtles cool! If its something else, also cool!
Be the change.
nothing is stopping you friend!

oh my god who cares

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.

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

Learning curve is huge compared to other social media
The sad thing is, is not really that more complicated, it's just got a bumpy on-ramp. join-lemmy.org is a lot better than it used to be, but it's still got this anxiety-producing step where you have to select a home server.

I have no intention of leaving

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.

A comment to show I'm here!

Me too! I'm doing my part!
- There are literally dozens of us! Dozens!

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.

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.

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

AreYouNotEntertained.gif

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.

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.

Not to draw either of us into this but you are specifically one of the users that makes me not want to hang out on lemmy.
- You are now a pedo-nazi. Sorry for your loss, better luck next time.
- Fine by me. You'll find a place willing to cater to your more reactionary tendencies, just good luck finding one that doesn't also cater to nazis.
- 100% agree. At least we can tag people (unsure if it's client-side feature of Sync or whatever), so there's that.
Thank you. I keep seeing strawmen "tankie" posts repeatedly. No wonder people are leaving

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.

Some of the apps can do that (Connect for one), but it isn't a core Lemmy feature yet.
Lemmy v0.19 will have this feature
Yeah I wish I could silence the star trek instance. I don't want to block them though, they're nice people. I just have never watched star trek so I have no idea what any of their posts mean, so having them in my feed is not desirable.
Now I understand how my friends feel when I talk about Halo lore.
- When you first saw Halo, were you blinded by its majesty?
- I love star trek, so I love that instance, but Lemmy.world feels like its replicating the toxic discussion style from reddit. I'm not here because I loved reddit but hate what they did to it. I have hated reddit for years, I am here for a completely different thing from reddit. The slrpnk instance and the Lemmy.ml are the main instances I want to interact with. If there are other anarchist instances in the future, I'd like to interact with those, but ideally keep the toxic bullshit to a minimum.
You do this in sync as well
You can do that on the Connect app for Android.

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 :/

Don't use the official Reddit app. Instead, grab the last release apk of Sync for Reddit from apkmirror, then use revanced manager to patch it with your own api key (and probably patched out the ads while you're at it).
See this guide for more info.
- Thanks dude
- I'll take a look, main reason I moved to Lemmy was because of sync as it's what I was used to.
Honestly it feels good to read the "end" of Lemmy occasionally. It reminds me that I spend a lot of time on this app (and used to spend more time in reddit) and forces me to close it and do something else, even if it's just to open a non-social media app.
- I get that, it's just it's only good for certain topics and anything more niche or casual isn't well represented. This place did get me into Linux again though haha.

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

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

Out of curiosity, how does one find this so called "anime porn"?

Wtf is Misskey?

It's a (mostly) Japanese Fediverse social media network with a fuckton of cute emoji reactions, static and animated.

Firefish (was Calckey) seems to be based off of this.

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?

So just say anything?

No u
- No u

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.

https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse
This defederations are so stupid lame. Lemmy.world is the worst

I still have Reddit; I haven't used it in a while though

I got banned from reddit for saying "Men would blame anything else before ever admitting that toxic masculinity is the source of their misery"
- There's nothing that brings out hostility on the internet quite as effectively as suggesting men may have flaws. It's surprising how many men can't handle it - which, one might argue, is a flaw. I'm going to hide now.

Degrowth happened. Anyway.

I mean my accounts keep getting banned pretty much just for commenting on worldnews threads these days so idk.

Yep... You're right.

Supercommunities

Probably because of bad memes with bizarre phrases like "user is keep"

Network Effect

It would probably help not to have this happen:

https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/554307/Just-wanted-a-warning-Lemmy-World-is-perhaps-worse-than-reddit

https://sh.itjust.works/comment/5266857

shieet