- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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
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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.
Agreed lemme is probably one of the most negative places on the Internet. I joined because I was hoping this place would grow to be a proper alternative for Reddit, with fun niche content, and its own culture of obscure inside jokes. Instead even after several years it still feels like we are the angry trolls living under reddit’s shadow.
One of the biggest things I’ve found that helped me avoid the politics was to leave lemme.world and fill my personal feed up with subscriptions to content that fits my interest. Politics has ways of working its way into content none the less, but at least I’ve got a fighting chance.
I really do believe lemme is going to struggle to find people who want to stick around unless it starts to embrace fun light hearted content. I’m not sure how we’d do that as a platform, but I do believe that’s one of the big reasons people will struggle to adopt this corner of the Internet as their own.
I guess the problem are the users (you and me) or better or use of plattforms itself.
On reddit I tended to be lurker. And if most of us are the few which actually POST content are the those with strong (mostly political) views who are willing to commit to their cause by flooding the zone with political fights.
Coclusion: If we want a cozy lemmy we need to join/start non-political, subject specific communities and actually CONTRIBUTE something instead of just consuming. Otherwise this cluster of plattforms will end up like all the other due to the same reasons.
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.
Doing my part by trying to comment more on posts with 0 comments.
0-comment posts should be at the bottom of the default feed for this reason. That way new users don’t get scared by the awkward silence
Yeah, same here honestly. Well said, lemmy needs more people here
oh hey, i’m a comment dude. I rarely think up something worth posting, but i’ll chat your fingers off. everyone has a place here.
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
they are separate, but not huge
They are separate but they are federated, they can see lemmy’s content and viceversa.
Edit: addition: Their success benefits lemmy, this is the beauty of the fediverse, competition is not really competition, we all win.
They seem doing fine, especially PieFed.
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.
It’s not just Europe. Plenty of us in the United States looking to circumvent the vanguard party. And fascism is rising globally. We need decentralization and federation to survive going forward.
We’re actually seeing a rise in new user applications over at Feddit.dk. The hostile behavior of the US has gotten some Reddit users to seek alternatives to american platforms.
When I look at some generic instance’s unfiltered feed all I see is posts about USA/Trump. I can see how this might deter a lot of Europeans who are looking for alternatives to Reddit.
Yeah I’m ngl the All feed kinda sucks.
I don’t think people shouldn’t be talking about the horrors in the US but if “all” is just 5 LW posts in a row on US politics its not exactly enticing for a new user.
Piefed sign up process asks the new user if they want to mute Trump and Musk. That helps a bit.
It is. It’s one of the reasons i’ve pivot back to reddit these last few months.
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More then Reddit this place is an echo chamber for the far left anti capitalist crowd. While I don’t mind a discussion, everything over simplified to EAT THE RICH was getting tiresome.
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No company or institution is here. If I have a problem with my [insert device or appliance here] chances are good someone on reddit will reply and 50/50 there is a useable answer somewhere. Here it just stays silent. Or you get the anti capitalist reply that everything is fucked and we should just eat the rich.
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There are no real gaming or device or brand communities. Want to ask something about modding game x? Not here. Want to hook up with other players of game y? Not here. Want to know how to fix your [household appliance here]? Not here…Have a problem with mainboard from brand z? Not here.
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When you ask something here about Linux or any other gpl software the answer often times boils down to RTFMI! (I= idiot) That also happens on reddit to be honest. But here it’s just more extreme. And I know I’m an idiot. That’s why I asked. I’m too stupid can someone please explain.
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Where the fuck is LJDawson. Sync is dead it seems.
And yes. Reddit more and more feels like an AI test site. For example the AITA posts are getting more and more out of this world. They are unbelievable, that’s just for clicks. So the enshittification is not slowly but very fast becoming a problem and within a few months it will be another youtube, unusable. But for now… It’s the best we have.
There are no real gaming or device or brand communities.
Some relatively active (in terms of posts, breadth of content and user engagement) gaming communities across Lemmy/Threadi:
- Adventure Games - [email protected]
- Automation Games - [email protected]
- Cozy Games - [email protected]
- City Builders - [email protected]
- Indie Games (variety) - [email protected]
- Lifesim Games - [email protected]
- Open Source Games - [email protected]
- PC RPGs (cRPGs) - [email protected]
- Roguelike Games - [email protected]
- RTS Games - [email protected]
- Space Games (variety) - [email protected]
- Strategy Games - [email protected]
- Turn-based Strategy (e.g. 4X) - [email protected]
- Tycoon / Business Sim Games - [email protected]
- Video Game Art - [email protected]
- Video Game Music - [email protected]
- Video Game Questions - [email protected]
I moderate/curate like 6 of them, so I am biased, but we do have a solid selection of gaming communities beyond [email protected] or [email protected].
- More then Reddit this place is an echo chamber for the far left anti capitalist crowd. While I don’t mind a discussion, everything over simplified to EAT THE RICH was getting tiresome.
That must be so difficult for you compared to all the wonderful corporate platforms full of rightwing hateful trolls who genuinely harass people.
I’m going to tentatively upvote this. There’s a good reason the left wingers on this platform sound bitter (myself included). The Overton Window has shifted right, so they’re pretty much surrounded by toxic right-wing stuff on every other platform.
Still, it doesn’t help Lemmy attract moderates.
What conservatives want is for us to treat them like babies with tiny little fragile baby beliefs that we have to coddle.
I don’t care if you think differently than me, what I care about is babies demanding we take their hateful and irrational ideologies seriously while they simultaneously target vulnerable groups with at a minimum hate speech and harassment.
If we coddle conservatives this place becomes less welcoming to new people, that is how it is.
Yeah you’re absolutely right. Though we are talking about two separate things here; OP and I are talking about “eat the rich” left rhetoric. Like people coming here and seeing comments like, “wheel out the guillotines”, and “kill all CEOs”.
You’re talking about the fact that we shouldn’t welcome conservative voices after they’ve ruined the rest of the internet. I absolutely 100% completely agree with you.
I’ll give you an example; I’m more leftie than my wife. So it surprising to her when I said that people should be allowed to just punch Nazis with no legal ramifications. Like to her it was actually confronting to hear someone she knew advocate for violence. I explained my reasoning. They are corrosive to society’s norms, and really need a different set of rules to regular people to be contained. The only language they understand is violence.
But the point is the average person is going to be immediately repulsed by calls for violence and extreme rhetoric, regardless of whether it is morally justified and the reasoning is technically correct.
So imagine a moderate “regular” person coming to this forum. Without the context of history that you and I have, how do they interpret these comments? Will they want to stay on Lemmy?
I’m not saying Lemmy should change, by the way. I have no problem with the rhetoric, and there’s a case to be made that getting rid of it may make it easier for conservatives to get a foothold here. But it’s worth a discussion, I guess.
And that all said, there’s a chance that by “eat the rich” OP means anything complaining about the rich, in which case they can fuck off to their own instance.
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Just wait and let Reddit have another controversy and we’ll get another infusion of converts.
Just wait
this is how something like Digg swoops in and steals all the users
Or Bluesky / Threads vs Mastodon
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.
I agree. New user introduction is very poor. Took me ages just to choose an instance - and that was in no small part because I’m here not only to escape the enshittified chokepoint capitalism of american big tech, but also because I’m utterly sick of the domination of US centric points of view and censorship. Even though i know communities are not instance locked, I wanted an instance that is not likely to be managed in the same way. Time will tell if I chose well or poorly
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.
You can say that again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy
Really muddles up the search results about lemmy.
Lemmy standing for “Marxist-Leninist” surely is off-putting to some. Might be better to re-brand it as “Feddit” (federated Reddit).
I’m presented the same shit over and over again.
Do you sort by active? Use hot or scaled instead.
Yeah, it was sorted by active. Changed it to hot, let’s see how that goes. Thanks for the hint.
Active is basically like old forum logic, where new comments will bump it up back to the top. Scaled is my go to view first as it does a pretty good job balancing out communities of widely different sizes, so smaller communities that you’re subbed to have a chance of having their post be seen if it’s new and larger in upvoter count.
Have you considered trying out Piefed? Piefed has custom feed options currently.
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.
I don’t really know how you make the onboarding, the instance selection easier at this point. What do you propose?
What site did you use when you found lemmy?
I’m a reddit user and that’s also where I first heard about lemmy the first time.
Yesterday I decided to give it a try, current events pushed me away from everything American and so I thought it was about time.
I searched for something like ‘lemmy getting started’ and landed on this site: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/01-getting-started.html
So the first greeting is a wall of text. After I read through it, I found myself here: https://join-lemmy.org/instances
Now I got a bunch of options with no real way to evaluate what’s what. I spent some time there looking through the options and didn’t really know what to choose and what the impact would be. I used a search engine again to look for some opinions about the biggest ones which lead me nowhere, mostly.
So I kinda gave up and selected programming.dev because that’s close enough to what I do professionally. I clicked on join and was presented with this https://programming.dev/signup
So I don’t know if that differs from instance to instance, but you need a moment to process this. The first few fields are obvious but then it starts to get a little weird. Instead of a checkbox or even implicit accepting of TOS and privacy policy (by registering here you agree to…) you have to take or copy paste that exact sentence into that answer box with a preview button(?) and then fill in the captcha. After that you are told that your registration needs to be approved manually and that there is no notification about that so you have to manually check from time to time whether your are able to login or not.
But it didn’t end here. Because I found that the webui wasn’t that great on mobile, I wanted an Android app. So I ended up here: https://join-lemmy.org/apps
And yet again was confronted with a bunch options I somehow had to evaluate. I’m still in the process finding an app I really like.
Now I know this is no rocket science, and having options is a good thing usually.
But still considering the average usually not tech savvy user, all of that is too much by quite a bit. That’s overwhelming for the majority of people.
This whole thing needs to be a 10 second streamlined process. There should be one button to get you started. The instance selection site tells you: ‘You can access all content in the lemmyverse from any server, so it doesn’t matter which one you choose.’
So if that’s the case, why bother the user with it? I admit I know jack shit about the fediverse, but if I were to design such a thing, I’d separate the IdP (identity provider) from the service/content providers. Have a couple of them redundantly, hosted by different parties so one entity can not shut down everything. Let the user register once, replicate that identity across the IdPs and let some interest selection wizard determine which content instances the use should be added to.
I know that’s a big architecture change and will never happen. So maybe have that one obvious registration routine for a user and choose a first instance for the user based on interests or randomly (from a curated list to prevent users landing on some extreme instances) if the user can not be bothered to fill in their interests.
Have one default app which is good and recommended that. Let the app have sensible defaults (like the sorting thing), present most popular content first to hook the user.
Let the user look for alternatives later if they want to do that.
Don’t let the user do all the homework upfront before they even know whether they even care and if it’s worth the effort. Most people simply won’t do it.
PS. Nope I do not know about ‘Piefed’. I’ll check it out later. It wasn’t mentioned on all that sites that I looked at and that’s part of the problem.
That’s just my 2 cents.
Here is the instance chooser that @[email protected] mentioned.
There are a ton of features that PieFed has that Lemmy lacks. Like Reddit’s, PieFed’s “search” feature sucks ass (by design, as it is not the top priority right now), and Lemmy’s btw is super fantastic, though you don’t even need to have a user account to use Lemmy’s search feature, and everything else is better on PieFed, often by a lot (but, some very few not as good though). PieFed even has features that Reddit itself lacks - which makes sense when you realize that all features that Reddit has pumped out in the past 10 years or so have been to increase their profit margins rather than offer any functionality that users themselves wanted.
PieFed is the future of the Threadiverse. Many instances have already or are currently in the process of switching over to it. At least give it a look? The sign-in process will surely convince you to stay, but if not then we’d all be interested to know your thoughts on what turned you away too?
Oh, one major caveat: most of PieFed’s most advanced features (such as polls, user and post flairs, categories of communities, topic areas and user-customizable & shareable feeds, etc.) are not available yet from 3rd party apps, which having been designed for Lemmy originally they are still mainly restricted to the basic functionality that Lemmy offers. Even there, imho having to visit the PieFed website UI rarely to turn on an option that would affect daily/hourly interaction via a 3rd party app still makes PieFed more worthwhile compared to Lemmy that does not even offer those kinds of features at all - e.g. the ability to block all users from an instance.
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 came to this space in November of 2024.
As a trans person I wanted community. So I checked out blahaj first. But, the queer community here is controlled by Ada who bans anyone she doesn’t like and i ticked her off once by not bowing to her judgement when it came to allowing trolls to stay in the space. This drama also splintered the 196 community, and neither 196 space has had the same number of participants since.
So no more queer community for me. I’ve had to get that other places like Tumblr.
I then decide to use the .db0 community to report what I feel is abusive behavior from .blahaj staff and after enough time they realized that they really don’t like people using the “report abuse community” to report abuse of specific spaces like blahaj. Banned for using the space for what it was created for.
So no more .db0
I’m just so tired of using this space, it feels just like reddit except there’s somehow even less accountability.
Every week i feel less and less compelled to contribute
I used to enjoy posting like a dozen memes a day and now I don’t post anymore. It’s not fun it’s a chore to keep feeding memes and engagement into this space that pretty much only has told me it hates me for the last year.
Bad app :c
Mods like Ada will destroy Lemmy in general.
Edit: I’ll elaborate. Ada will not only ban you if you hurt their feelings, they’ll also ban you across several other communities even if you’ve never posted in them. That’s absurd. Must have onion-thin skin. Who acts like that?
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.
It’s not that we’re missing more user, but rather that we are missing communities where people would come for the community specifically.
Lemmy is filled with people that want something that is reddit without being reddit.
We will start winning the moment we have communities were people join Lemmy to be part of said community.
…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 :’(
Yeah I’m turned off from interacting. I got banned (I’m guessing since I can’t even reply to people) from world news when Maduro was kidnapped and I mentioned that my Venezuelan friends were hopeful. As this was scary but good news. And my god how I got flamed. Theres no room for conversation I got tagged, replied to, people made fun of me and that’s it. I wasn’t even allowed to interact anymore so it looks like I just said something and ran away.
I’m not even close to center, yet it’s all or nothing with politics here. It’s seriously become reddit 2.0. Pathetic.
Yeah. The .world news community mods don’t seem to care about clickbait, misinformation, calls for violence or doxxing or rape, as long as they’re the “correct” politics. Calling for Ivanka Trump to get shot? Serious deepfake meme? Perfectly acceptable, apparently, in spite of the admins’ pushback.
But make a comment like yours, and the moderation is… that.
I haven’t even blocked the tankie communities or anything, but I had to block /c/politics, as they’re so active they pollute my feed.
I’m fine with leaving that part of Lemmy permanently blocked though.
kinda odd you dint block the tankies, they are just as problematic if not more so. thats why i had them blocked. i had to block politics because the people are subtly promoting pro-zionist content.
I like Lemmy as a “zoo”
I like seeing nuts and weirdos and niches and stuff when I scroll by. It feels like the old internet. And I also find that lemmy.ml has good discussions outside tankie politics, so I don’t want to block that out.
Problem with the main political subs is that they’re so big they flood post sorted by Active, Rising, or New Comments. Their tabloid garbage crowds everything else out.
I don’t mind other opinions. I don’t mind different points of view. I don’t mind culture and mentality differences. I’m Ukrainian living in America so the views I have, while leaning heavily left, differ to the point of leftists vehemently opposing even the slightest push back to some policies or views.
For this reason I never delete my comments and never block anyone. I need to see more. I need to see the different people and cultures. Otherwise we set up a community like parts of Seattle (where I live) that is in this political bubble that get shocked when anyone has views that differ. It creates this perspective that these other people don’t exist and that the world was stolen from them. And the reason they can’t comprehend other views is because they’re involved in communities where these views get erased.
I really admire this, and wish I was more like this. I had conservative parents and grew up in a conservative echo chamber. I got their opinions shoved down my throat my entire life. I have exactly 0 patience for conservative most view points. Especially when there it conflicts with scientific evidence and/or common decency. I tend to shut down conversations (online and in real life) with people that disagree with me.
Reality is it just hurts me to see their opinions being the dominant/default position in society. Makes our society feel unforgiving.
But I’m trying to change. I’m meditating, and journaling on this.
why beat yourself up. you know good content won’t be rewarded or seen.
only the ragebait. the internet is not information driven anymore, it’s dopmine driven.
it’s the super highway of rage and hate.
I get bummed that the political stuff has really taken over. I find myself spending more and more time just working on my own content and answering people’s comments than browsing the other communities. It’s draining scrolling past so much stuff to find the fun bits, but I don’t want to just block it and not see how our platform is developing as a whole.
A lot of communities have rules that posts need to be titled the same as the source article, which, while it prevents editorializing, it also brings all those ragebait headlines here. Plus I’d like to see Lemmy users’ opinions moreso than an article I could just read myself. I’d probably prefer more of the political post to be thoughts/feelings and then discussion is backed up by decent articles rather than an article being the post and comments are just all steered back to a single, often inflammatory article.
If half our content is just reposted mainstream media, why would one expect our comment sections to look any different than the comment sections of those mainstream sites?
A lot of communities have rules that posts need to be titled the same as the source article, which, while it prevents editorializing, it also brings all those ragebait headlines here. Plus I’d like to see Lemmy users’ opinions moreso than an article I could just read myself.
If half our content is just reposted mainstream media, why would one expect our comment sections to look any different than the comment sections of those mainstream sites?
I agree with the sentiment but disagree with the prognosis.
In my experience, the ragebait articles around here are largely from the same sites. Rawstory, mediaite, dailybeast, some of The Guardian’s more indulgent pieces. I won’t presume to know why the posters post them, but they’re ragebait to start.
I don’t even see “Big Media” like Reuters or local news or whatever get upvoted much. And as longs as the news sections aren’t mixed up with the opinion ones, IMO they’re more professional.
The accurate title rule is great as long as posters pick more journalistic articles instead of opinion pieces or reposts. And if they don’t there’s no fixing that anyway.
I’d probably prefer more of the political post to be thoughts/feelings and then discussion is backed up by decent articles
And I straight up I disagree with this.
There are tons of talking heads with opinions. But journalism rooted in sourcing is much harder. That should come first, or at least come with an opinion in the OP, and then the discussion can be built around facts.
The info hygiene here is really bad. I thought people here would be better about finding well sourced informative articles to talk about but its the same news slop that dominates other platforms. This is a discussion forum so posts should have something worth discussing. Spamming the same trump action over and over doesnt create any discussion.
Scrolling through the news community is so depressing there is no comments because everyone is thinking “what do you want me to say its bad its awful”
On the contrary, I’ve made a few (not a ton) of what I thought were interesting news posts, but they don’t seem to gain traction.
I think the deeper issue is ragebait works, very well. The community seems to be content with that, and Lemmy/Piefed devs aren’t structuring the site the counter it.
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”.
I hope Lemmy continues to decline, instead Piefed should reign supreme.
doesn’t it already? i made the switch when my instance shut down and i like it just as much.
Unfortunately it’s not even close, yet.
According to these two links
Piefed had 7,415 users with some sort of activity for the month
Lemmy had 1,261,530 users with some sort of activity for the month
Obviously these stats are of questionable reliability given the nature of decentralized platforms, and it’s hard to say how much of this activity is “real” or otherwise “content originating from Lemmy”, but at the moment it’s not a contest.
Luckily, Piefed can continue being used to see Lemmy content for as long as they have funding so it doesn’t matter much in the short term how much smaller Piefed’s userbase is. We just collectively have to make sure we buy the devs and instances some coffee to keep the lights on.
that. is. wild.
i had no idea we were so small.
A) “Lemmy” is an embarrassingly bad name.
B) Most of the content I see on here seems to be shitposts. Not saying it all is, but the immediate impression for new users is terrible.
C) Lemmy’s biggest strength is also its biggest weakness. Moderation is near non-existent and the comment section of posts always devolves into shit.
C) Moderation varies wildly based on the instance, and the community. I wouldn’t say Lemmy comment sections are any worse than Reddits though.
Most people on Reddit avoid the larger subs like the plague though - but then when they come here, they don’t know what to avoid or even to pay attention to, e.g. is [email protected] a lively and fun, exciting place, or a toxic cesspit hellhole?
And at least that one is honest about what it is, whereas lemmy.ml markets itself as a community dedicated to discussing FOSS! (Which, among other things, yes is one of the variety of things discussed there, although somehow that description seems to be missing a fair bit of information that would have REALLY helped out a ton in educating people what communities to participate in).
If we defederate Hexbear and ml, that will go some of the way to easing those bad experiences for new users
ml is run by the devs of Lemmy so unfortunately that’s not realistic, you could be missing on a ton of information if you want to subscribe to Lemmy development or information related communities
The devs can make accounts on a less controversial instance if they want their news to be heard by the rest of us
This is quite concerning indeed.
We should start by being better at retaining what we already have.
Every person is valuable now.
I’m worried that mods here are starting to abuse their power as have happened on Reddit and have seen some instances of it. A lot of people fled Reddit because of it and will not stick around for the same bullshit here.
So making mechanisms to prevent this kind of behavior must be a priority.
Just talk up Lemmy, the issue is most people doesn’t realize there’s another option to the popular toxic trash fires.
I’ve told people about Lemmy before. I got the same reaction everytime.
“It looks like it’s just people talking about computers.”
And their interest dies. Which tells me there needs to be more diversity of active communities. No one wants to come to a small platform, create a new dead community, and talk to themself.
To be completely honest, Lemmy is kinda dead outside the politics subs and some of the tech ones. When I deleted my reddit account I came here and joined some of the communities I was using reddit for: Pathfinder 2e, RPG, memes, anime. Out of all of them I only see an occasional post from memes while the other ones are literal ghost towns.
ive seen less movies, entertainment, tv shows posts than before, when ee was still alive.
Shameless plug.
If you are into computer RPGs (CRPGs), we have a relatively active community:
The JRPG community is also pretty active:
they should link to each other in the sidebar so people know how to find them
Waiting in my instance to update to Piefed 1.4, I will add World of JRPGs to the sidebar once that happens.
Lemmy communities could benefit from a webring concept.
You’re right! That’s perfect! that’s what i was looking for, now i have a name to it. thank you. i think it would maybe work well enough if the sidebar could link to related communities?
We have an open issue for this: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5871
We need comments, that is the problem. Small communities don’t get any positive feedback via engagement, which causes them to die as the owner/sole poster feels like no one cares.
Simply link dumping (effectively what most posts are on content aggregators) is the easy part. Seeing even 1 comment inclines someone to open up the post to read the comment, which makes them in turn likely to reply and it builds from there to a hot/active conversation.
If you can just aim to write that first comment on or two posts a day in more niche communities, it will help achieve growth.
75% of small communities, if not higher, don’t use lemmy-federate to expand the visibility of their community. The user makes the community, broadcasts a few posts locally and then gets sad that no-one replies (because it can only be seen locally). Nor do they make use of [email protected] or [email protected] to advertise.
I use lemmy-federate a lot to help this, but it’s sometimes too late after they set the comm up.
That’s another good point.
PieFed has at least taken some steps to work on this, with it automatically posting new communities to NewCommunities and auto-subbing the instance to those posted there.
If the Lemmy devs stopped pushing ML propaganda, transphobia, and genocide denial and actually worked on the software, we might be in a better place today.
