600 more active users in the last few days, from 47225 to 47827 in two days

Blaze (he/him)@sopuli.xyz to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 624 points –

Source: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats

Context: Reddit made a few controversial annoucements, feel free to have a look at !reddit@lemmy.world

For people wanting to discuss why some people focus on Lemmy's growth, here is a recent thread from !asklemmy@lemmy.world :

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IMO fediverse is big enough now to serve as reddit replacement.

It's not the size, it's the content. Lemmyverse is a lot more serious and honestly, gloomy. Average age seems to be quite higher too. If all you used reddit for was news, politics, technical discussion and porn lemmy might be perfectly fine but there's way less meme or entertainment content here

There is less of everything. Less sports, less hobbies, less local groups, less crafts, less academic discussions, less indie hackers and entrepreneurs, less fashion/brand/style enthusiasts...

Memes and entertainment are too shallow and can be found anywhere, we need to focus on getting some people focused on the deeper end. Reddit's strength is in its long tail of interests. Instead of running blackouts or general protests, we should have focused on bringing one specific community to Lemmy (like e.g, knitting), figure out the issues and support them to migrate fully. If we pulled that off, other communities would have a template to emulate.

I mean yes but imo the solution isn’t any of that. The problem is that Reddit has super niche communities that people expected to have enough users to build here. That isn’t the case. And we shouldn’t be looking to transplant entire communities because that rarely works.

People really need to hear this: You need to be cross posting every single niche community post into a more general community. There are too many posts on here that exist in a knitting community but not in a general hobby community that’s more active.

This is how Reddit works and we need to follow the template. You need strong pillars that people can flock to and then branch out from there. Examples might be r/funny, r/sports, etc. Then if people want super populated places to go and chat and post, those general communities are there. If they’re new, they can find your niche community by browsing the populated places. We don’t need templates for communities, we just need to have a few really populated places with high engagement to promote natural growth.

Transplanting communities rarely work because it takes a catastrophic event to push everyone in the same direction. The Reddit protests were, IMNSHO, such an event. I get it, hindsight is 20/20, but I think that if I had started my work on Fediverser when the API pricing changes were first announced, I would have in June all the tooling needed to make a coordinated mass migration.

Yup, I like Lemmy but there are still those subreddits that Lemmy can't fully replace for certain sports teams I follow.

The way I see it is that when I've run out of content on Lemmy, that's my indication to put down my phone and do something else. My buddy framed it in that way during a discussion we had the other day and I think he hit the nail on the head.

If I only browsed my subscribed feed that'd maybe amount to to 5-10 minutes of stuff a day. On the other hand if I open the all feed there's an endless steam of the stuff I mentioned above. As I said, what's lacking isn't volume it's the content of the volume

I still appreciate Lemmy more. It's more intimate and people are way more respectful. Also, Reddit is full of shit comments. Lemmy comments aren't perfect or amazing, but I visited Reddit this week looking for memes (agree with your point on quantity of memes) and perused the comments. I forgot how stupid and formulaic Reddit can be. I'm really happy that didn't transfer over to Lemmy.

Yeah I'm glad reddit's comment culture didn't carry over

I think for the most part it stayed in reddit, and I’m so glad it did. But I have run into the odd “classic” reddit comment like “sigh unzips” and jfc did it make me realize how much I had not missed that kind of tired, uncreative, dumb bullshit joke.

Some people really want lemmy, or the fediverse for that matter, to be reddit. And that’s not a bad thing of its own. But maybe we can let it be what it wants to be.

Some people really want lemmy, or the fediverse for that matter, to be reddit. And that’s not a bad thing of its own. But maybe we can let it be what it wants to be.

Personally, I'm fine with Lemmy not completely replacing Reddit, but rather just being a viable alternative for those of us who are tired of Reddit. I've only been using Lemmy for a handful of days and I'm already quite happy with it as it is.

Maybe it's just the communities I frequent, but I think it did carry over. There's a lot of sarcastic comments, holier than thou comments, and meme comments on Lemmy just like Reddit.

Edit: Also, a lot of negativity.

I imagine this is controversial, but I appreciate that there’s less entertainment here. I’ve already had more decent discussions here in the last 6 months, even if I disagreed strongly with the other person, than I have on Reddit since the 3rd party app debacle.

The constant churn of what some people consider entertaining, or the never-ending effort in attempts to be the entertaining and flippant comment that gets upvotes even on serious subjects really just gets old. I don’t mean to say people shouldn’t have a sense of humor, but when everything starts to revolve around cheap quips and retreads of the same old comments, that’s stagnation. Any serious sub big enough to damp that behavior also tends to be more exclusive of outside opinion.

So I guess I’m happy with news, politics, tech, and porn - though I have to admit I blocked out a crapton of the porn when Lemmy was new because it was overwhelming so I don’t see much of that in /all anymore.

Tbh it definitely helps with my phone addiction. The content starts to run out and I can just put down my phone.

entertainment

memes

I'm surprised by this, I feel like memes are everywhere

If anything, this only proves their point: there is less of everything. Compare this amount of content a similar sub on reddit.

Be the change you want to see. Also I noticed that Lemmy is less active on weekends, which is probably healthier

I don't mean discussion about entertainment, I mean communities that entertain you like damnthatsinteresting, unexpected, nextfuckinglevel etc. And considering how much of their content is in video form, I don't think they can viably exist in lemmy.

memes are everywhere

Maybe generic and reposted memes are, but nothing of the sort of niche meme communities that constantly popped up in reddit

The gloomyness is definitely a problem. Progressives are usually better at empathy so they feel everyone's pain. And if you are looking for it you'll find shit and pain all day long.

We need more positive posts on here.

We already have instances that go down or suffer from intermittent federation issues when lemmy.world gets a bit more active. The most conservative estimates are putting Reddit at 75 million DAU. If we get to 1% of that, you can bet that our current network would choke, badly.

Not only we need more instances, we also need to be a lot smarter about their organization and how to architect this network. I think we will only be able to grow larger if we make a more intentional separation between topic-based instances and "people-home" instances, so that we can have a better spread of the load.

The total federated bandwith is definatly a bottle neck we are starting to approach (ie what we see with .world and it overloading small instances). Not sure the solution here but I'm sure we can work past it without compromising on decentralisation.

Not sure the solution here

I am more and more convinced that we will need something like what I outlined here.

Good article. But the trend of the internet it to not use a browser but an app that often emulates a browser.

Which is still a client. I honestly don't care if we are talking about a mobile app, a PWA, a browser extension, a SPA or a dedicated app: as long as the business logic goes to the edge and the server is a "mere" dumb pipe, we should be okay.

That would be better, but also put more cost on the users who have been spoiled by decades of someone else paying for incremental access to, storage of and processing of data.

Another article of mine arguing that modern devices are more than able to handle that.

I'll read that but before I do, I want to point out that developers generally have the latest, most expensive tech and they generally build for that first.

We are not talking about complex tasks like video transcoding or ML training. ActivityPub is first and foremost, a messaging protocol. The most heavy thing that "must" live on the device is the user data. Sqlite can handle those workloads without a sweat. Old devices that can do XMPP group messaging should be more than able to do this.

We need more instances, but we need to be a lot smarter about the structure. I think we will only be able to grow larger if we make a more intentional separation between topic-based instances and "people-home" instances, so that we can have a better spread of the load.

I don't know if it would help with load-balancing, but I feel hash tags would be better than communities.

This goes against the design of ActivityPub, which requires people to follow actors. A hashtag does not have a single name, so people would have to follow all servers and/or the servers would have to relay activities that are not originating from their actors. It is possible, clunky to implement.

Isn't that just Mastodon and similar services? I prefer the community url scheme more that the hashtag scheme.

I agree that the hashtag scheme is bad. It attracts people that want to self-promote or bots.

Maybe an odd take, but I think one of the things missing to make people move over more is porn. So I’m trying to help - https://xxxiver.se

Cum for the porn, stay for the memes

Isn't lemmynsfw more popular?

Sure, Lemmynsfw is always going to have more users, but I want to serve the needs of the Creators. I’m trying to help get more content for users on lemmynsfw by helping OF Creators get involved.

It’s the fediverse, you can have multiple servers. And OF Creators can use a server that caters towards their needs and still reach their audience on lemmynsfw

Why would anyone pay for that if lemmynsfw is free?

https://xxxiver.se

Dude, you are asking for $10 a month to join. The fuck? You realize that porn is fucking free on the interwebs, right?

Are you an OF Creator selling porn? If not, then you wouldn’t be joining or paying.

It’s to help OF creators advertise in the fediverse, not to pay 10 bucks a month to watch porn.

Ohhhhh!! Ok, yeah, my bad. I just glanced at it, saw that, then bailed. But your explanation makes more since. Sorry!