Number of monthly active Lemmy users rising again

Blaze@reddthat.com to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 793 points –

https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats

First time this happens since a few months

243

I think it's much less intimidating to new users now compared to when I joined last year. The barrier to entry has been reduced significantly.

There are tons of active communities now, mobile apps that work great (this is a big one), and many more tools to block content that you don't want to see.

there is also more diverse content than the crap that was on here six months ago.

when 50% of the frontpage is linux memes... you're not going to gain the interest of most new users. now it seems to be down to about 20%

It's also worth noting I've recently been seeing a lot of Linux posts from people who just switched, this was somewhat of a trend on Reddit as well but imo the Linux posting has gotten noticeably less toxic toward newer users and a lot more understanding of the "using Linux without wanting to spend hours configuring everything" perspective.

Side point that's somewhat related to that: I wonder how the growth of other platforms FOSS platforms like Lemmy, Mastodon, Matrix, etc. has impacted Linux project development. Not sure if it's just me but it seems like it's helped a lot with making Linux communities more accessible.

Do I hear you say there's not enough linux memes? Let's fix that!

Anyway to make the all page more diverse? I feel like it’s just 10 communities that appear there and it’s basically broken down to tech, memes and politics. I’m on lemmy.world and ysint voyager. Every once in a while I see stuff from sh.itjust.works.

I know when I used to use kbin, you first had to let your device sync with other instances before they started populating onto your feed.

I knew about most of these, but had not stumbled upon casual conversation yet, thank you!

use Scaled sort

also just using the Subscribed feed is better than All, I spend a lot more time on Subscribed than on All

just look for communities on https://lemmyverse.net/communities

and subscribe to !newcommunities@lemmy.world

Didn’t even think to try scaled. It most definitely is showing more diverse posts. Downside is that it brings back a lot of non english speaking communities. Still a good option for exploring though!

Set your language options in your profile settings, should hide some of them, I think they're still working on improving Lemmy's default language settings

I still have no clue how instances work but whatever I'm doing has been working fine for nearly a year

instances are just distinct servers really.

and some of them are purpose/politics specific.

From an end user perspective there's not that much to think about, thankfully.

Basically, it's like having two websites that mirror each other's content. You can sign up for Forum A and be able to read and write posts that users on Forum B can also see. People's names are tagged with the name of the forum they are registered at, but otherwise everything you do and see happens on your own site of choice and there's no difference where it comes from.

If Forum A doesn't like Forum C, but Forum B doesn't mind, Forum A can choose to disconnect from Forum C and hide their users and posts, while Forum B can still see both. It only gets tricky when someone from Forum B makes a post that people from both Forums A and C are in, but all of the posts from C users are invisible to A users.

It's like how there's loads of different email providers but they can all still email each other.

Just like Gmail can send mail to Outlook and any other @EmailProvider.com, lemmy.world can populate it's feed/comments from lemm.ee and any other @LemmyInstance.com

Most often I've seen instances use as super communities. Largely revolving around a bigger topic. KDE runs their own with their own subcommunities for instance. They are far from the only ones. Just the one I use the most and a came to mind first. Having your own instance slap server allows you far more control over your communities then just hosting on someone else's server. But from an end user perspective very largely transparent. not even being noticeable oftentimes.

I still have no clue how instances work but whatever I’m doing has been working fine for nearly a year

You have a user account "Got_Bent", on an instance (you can think of this as a "server"), lemmy.world. That's your home instance. Thus, you are @Got_Bent@lemmy.world.

You can view communities on that instance. This post, in fact, is on a community on the lemmy.world instance, !fediverse@lemmy.world.

You can also view communities on any other other instances that lemmy.world is federated with (which is most of them). For example, !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk. By-and-large, you can use them the same way you can communities on your home instance.

Reddit is pretty similar, just that with Reddit, there's only one "instance", Reddit.

Instances might go down (so users with that instance as their home instance can't log in and communities on that instance aren't accessible. Some have certain rules about what users who use that instance as their home instance can do. Others have certain rules about what communities on their instance are allowed to do. For example, my home instance, lemmy.today, wants to avoid defederating with other instances (which means that people with that home instance can see all other content). Some instances, like beehaw.org, want to keep some content that might be objectionable to their users out, and will tend to defederate with other instances if they consider them to be problematic. Some instances allow hosting communities that have pornography (like lemmynsfw.com) and some do not (like sh.itjust.works). Same thing for communities dealing with religion or extreme political views, and so on.

In general, it's helpful to have a home instance in the same rough part of the world as you, as it'll make things more-responsive.

New user here........what? Easy to use? I've gotten to the point where I know how to do things, but, it's still needlessly complicated. Yes there are many active communities, but there are also not very many of them. The ironic thing is, you need to be discussing mainstream topics on the non-mainstream platform. If I wanted to talk about my favorite band? Nobody is here to do that. And if I do find a niche community here, but it's on another instance? NOW I know what to do. But when I first got here, I was ONLY subscribing to sublemmys on .world because it's the only way I knew how.

For this platform to grow, we're going to have to make it easy. Like, braindead easy.

Make it so you just click "join". Make it so you're logged in across ALL of Lemmy. Your posts may originate from Lemmy.World, but a non-techie wouldn't know or care about any of that. I see Lemmy making a big deal about the seperate instances. Like it's a selling point. It's only a selling point for people smart enough to understand it.

But imagine Britney. Now Britney is a fictional person I just made up to represent your bottom of the barrel intelligence level of people these days. Britney is just some pretty valley girl. She doesn't know what RSS is. She's never heard of Linux, despite having an android phone. Britney is who you cater the site to. Because Britney is America. She wants sublemmys about "The Voice" and "The Masked Singer". She wants a sublemmy for Taylor Swift. I think you're starting to get the type of person I'm talking about.

You can still operate Lemmy almost exactly how it is now. Just make it so even if you know NONE of that stuff, you can still operate it freely. I will use MySpace as an example (for the brief 4 years it was the top social media). There was a default MySpace look. If all you did was sign up, and do nothing else, you still had a myspace account, and you could still customize it to an extent. It's the basic profile everyone thinks of when you think of a myspace profile. The colors, the layout, the look. It was still usable. Then you had people using CSS and HTML and I think Javascript was available. Now suddenly you have 50 different profiles, all looking completely different. All functioning exactly the same, but you could go as deep or as shallow as you wanted.

THATS what this site needs. Don't take away the stuff for the techie people. Let them go nuts. Let them do crazy things with this platform. But also, to increase userbase, make it as shallow as possible unless the user changes things. America wants shallow and not challenging. America doesn't want to think. Britney just wants a place to type "I LOVE TAYLOR! I LOVE TAYLOR! I LOVE TAYLOR!" over and over. You can keep her happy, and keep yourselves happy. And I'm somewhere in the middle. It needs to be a platform that conforms to the user. Because if the user needs to conform to the platform, they will not join that platform.

Did Reddit do something stupid to scare people away again?

They have bots roaming the site, banning people, seemingly at random. I went from never having been banned on reddit on a 10 year account, to banned for 3 days twice, and then permanently banned all in the span of a month.

And when did this happen? The week after the IPO went public.

And what kind of messages got me banned? Well one of them was in /r/Cleveland where a guy posted a security camera picture of the guy who stole his bike. I made the comment that the theif looks like a guy who stole MY bike in the early 90s, and that maybe this was his son. Keeping it in the family business.

I was banned for that comment for "Harassment and abuse of reddit users". The action was performed by an AI bot. If I wanted an appeal I could appeal. So I did. It SAID the appeal was handled by a real human. They still sided with the bots decision, which tells me that it wasn't handled by a real person.

So now I'm here. Just don't steal my bike, ok guys?

Hey dude, I've been looking for you for so long, since my Dad stole your bike and that was a turning point in my life, since I made a point of stealing your son's bike.

It is said that this will continue for generations until the seventh son of a seventh son, who'll transform into an upside down toothless vampire who likes garlic.

In order for this prophecy to come true, please ensure all your progeny keeps buying bikes.

PS Welcome to Lemmy!

I made the comment that the theif looks like a guy who stole MY bike in the early 90s, and that maybe this was his son. Keeping it in the family business.

That's hilarious. They don't deserve you.

Just don't steal my bike, ok guys?

I won't!

...but what kind of bike and where is it, just so I know what I'm not stealing and where I should avoid stealing it from

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reddit is about the same in my opintion, but I do see a lot more activity on the lemmy side. I think its a combination of:

  1. Less rules around communities. The barrier of entry is much lower here to post, and things dont get auto-removed because of trigger happy mods.

  2. 2% of users post 90% of content. And a lot of them moved over to lemmy.

  3. Servers can be brought into existence and removed at will. This may seem like a bad thing, but what it means is that the best lemmy servers can evolve and be successful in a way reddit cant. Some have different modifications to make them more user friendly, some have excellent uptime, etc...etc...

  4. People from mastodon/misskey/other fediverse instances can comment/post. Even if that is not what a vast majority of us do, it does help the numbers and will continue to help engagement.

Also to @Blaze@reddthat.com Do you know if the sats above take into account the generally banned instances of lemmy? I know that a lot of instances earlier this year decided to become de-federated from the general fediverse. Do you happen to know if the website take into account those servers?

Also to @Blaze@reddthat.com Do you know if the sats above take into account the generally banned instances of lemmy? I know that a lot of instances earlier this year decided to become de-federated from the general fediverse. Do you happen to know if the website take into account those servers?

Not sure about this unfortunately

This one had .zip and that's why I choose it.

The cracked apps using personal API keys stopped working a few days ago. Already fixed now I think.

Yep. That's why I'm here again. My reddit app may work for now, but the writing is on the wall in bigger, bolder letters.

Welcome back! Hope you like what we've done with the place.

They actually did, for a few days no 3rd party apps worked at all. But now they do again.

I thought all third party apps already stopped working?

Have you heard of ReVanced? Most commonly known for patching youtube to allow more features, mainly adblocking. Well they have patches for a ton of apps now so if you have a reddit account and say you're a developer you get your own API key they can be injected into some apps. It didn't work for me for a while but I eventually got it to work for the random search result from reddit.

Self hosting piped helps too. Love my little system.

They were working around it by using personal API keys iirc.

Not all of them, Dystopia for example was allowed to stay as is because of accessibility features that the native app lacks. It was even working just fine during the recent outage.

I use Geddit occasionally, I don't know if it supports voting or commenting though since I just browse.

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I think more people are coming here for my comments and delusions of grandeur.

Hi I’m new here. My friend has been trying to get me in for ages. The reason I am here is because my Reddit account of 10 years and one of 3 years got permabanned. And it was really for no reason. I tried to make a new account and that also got instantly permabanned. That’s when I found out that my 10year account also got banned. So yeah fuck what happened on Reddit.

I’m really liking lemmy and my iOS app (mlem) and enjoying the community. The only thing I miss from Reddit is the video integration.

What I don't miss from reddit is the bot comments. Not the novelty bots that reply if your comment is in alphabetical order or something like that, but actual chat gpt responses to regular posts or comments.

I have no idea what the point of them is, but they're awful.

Those were getting so out of hand.

u/OP: "What's a good mouse for a mix of productivity and gaming"

u/DefinitelyNotABot: "A good mouse for a mix of productivity and gaming is something you should be looking for if you need a mouse that is good for work and play. A good mouse for productivity and gaming will have a good balance of performance and features. Fortunately, finding a good mouse for a mix of productivity and gaming is not difficult due there being plenty of mouse options available to you[.....]"

What's the point of those types of bots, though? I guess they're just trying to have vaguely genuine looking accounts to use for some future purpose, maybe political or advertising related.

My best guess is karma farming so they can sell them off. Probably create hundreds of accounts they can sell off. If some brand buys an account that looks reputable for $20-$100 to use it for astroturfing then that's a pretty good deal for both sides. Shitty deal for everyone else.

That and building convincing personas for propaganda and PR. An account agreeing with pro corporate policies is more convincing if it has a long post history.

They'll sooner or later appear here too, that's sadly a reality all social media will suffer from now on. No filter can detect AI replies for long.

Do you think users, moderators, and admins on Lemmy could be more equipped (or at least more incentivized) to combat malicious bots compared to Reddit?

Running such a bot with an intentionally underpowered language model that has been trained to mimic a specific Reddit subculture is good clean absurdist parody comedy fun if done up-front and in the open on a sub that allows it, such as r/subsimgpt2interactive, the version of r/subsimulatorgpt2 that is open to user participation.

But yeah, fuck those ChatGPT bots. I recently posted on r/AITAH and the only response I got was obviously from a large language model... it was infuriating.

First rule of AITAH:

If the story isn't completely made up, no one will believe it's true.

Welcome! Hopefully you know about Lemmy Explorer, I've found it very useful in finding communities of interest to me.

That's wild, I've said so much zeisty stuff with my account but it's still not banned.

What I said wasn’t zesty at all. The only thing I can think of is someone went to all my comments and reported me. I’ve been temp banned from communities before but never banned from Reddit and would never expect to get permanently banned from Reddit the site along with my other Reddit accounts.

I got suspended for a Boeing joke, but deleted my account after that. I hope the same does not happen to Lemmy bcz the Internet needs a place to discuss links on the Internet.

I think we are now in a positive cycle:

  • More and more useful comments are posted,
  • Which means more people get interested,
  • which attracts more and more people to the platform
  • That increases the quality and quantity of posts/comments/etc.
  • etc.

Hey, ya get what ya pay for. Pay a little money, get a little quality. Pay a LOT of money, get a LOT of quality.

Well, I didn't get paid ANYTHING to be here, so you can imagine the quality of MY posts!

Hey, why did the poop walk into the poop?

To poop to the other poop! :D

See? Just zero quality....

This is fun but partially incorrect; yes, more money is better quality, however zero money means infinite quality. Prove me wrong, exhibit A is “the other site”.

Lemmy will achieve infinite growth. Invest now.

Reddit is getting worse.

Anyone noticed they've added tracking into the url?

They're AI banning more and more people for nonsense.

My perma-banned account still works well enough, I just can't comment or up/downvote. I can still subscribe and use RES.

Been a long time user and my 13 year old account banned because i said something bad about Putin. Deleted all reddit apps, my account's posts and whatnot, and now I'm here. Already digging this site.

Already digging this site.

No, this is Lemmy. Digg is already dead.

Digg's death is what led me to Reddit. Reddit's death led me here. I wonder where I'll be when Lemmy eventually dies or if I'll just die before it does. 🤔

I would want some federated more traditional forums instead of a reddit approach, that would have so many advantages, like threads not dying this often and just being easier to navigate

Both Discourse and NodeBB are working on fediverse integration, Discourse's is already live but they are still adding features to it

I can't envision a federated service dying. Even if it's me pedaling a bike to run a raspberry pi hosting an instance that's just me posting it'll exist.

I can't envision a federated service dying

The only way Lemmy could "die" would be if it is surpassed by a similar project (like Sublinks, Piefed, Mbin). If that project is also part of the fediverse, that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.

Edit: I suppose another way Lemmy could die would be if one of the larger instances somehow makes a closed-source fork of the software and improves it to the point where the majority of users flock to it. My hope is that Lemmy is already decentralized enough that this couldn't happen, and that Lemmy users would be savvy enough to oppose this if it did.

If the fediverse is so cool how come there's no fediverse 2 huh???

Same, both Digg leading to Reddit, and Reddit to Lemmy

Lemmy instances are designed to be born and die. So it's a good thing in my opinion.

I got banned because a mod found one of my comments distasteful and I accidentally commented on one of my alts. It’s ludicrous what those mods get away with.

I told a bot message to go fuck itself and a human mod took offense.

apparently you can still edit your comments with a banned account. some day when i'm really bored i'll go through and start editing all my comments on my 10+ yr old permabanned accts to be 10,000 characters of n̸̢̡̡̟̣̝̖͉̺̟̫̜̱̬̗̜̗̋̇ớ̷̢̧̡̦͍̝̖̣̪͉͕͕̙̖̭͔̯̪͚̯̳͇̻̬̺̲͓̞̫̦̝̮͉̞̣͖̻̮͔͍̤̺͕̦̓͑͗̀̂͋̍̆͛̂̏̽͐͘̕͠͠͝n̸̨̞͖̫̭̱̯̬̩̲͎̫̟͇͚̪̜̤̟͓͕̜̟̖̻̗͙̭̣̼͂͌͆̿̏̐͑́͘͝s̴̢̢̧̧̰̼̳̼̳̞̠̯̙̗̏̽̓̿̏̈́̀͑͂̀͊̏̆̎͑̚͜ȩ̴̛̪̻͍͙̰̥͖̱̘͚̦̻̎̏͑̊͂̈́̿̇̃̌̍́̽̌̒̊̃́͌̀̿̉̔́̑̕̕͘̚͠͝n̸̛̦͌͌̔͆͛͐̄̃͊̓̾͂͂s̷̛̼͙̞̬͙̠͉̖͙͎͇͓̫͓̺̯͈̣͍̮͑̃̐̑̌̃̔̇̚̚͝͝͠e̴̢̛͎̣̱͚͈̝̮̥͇̭͈̐̎̄̔̾͆̉̓́̂́̋̉̋̀̔̄̂̍͋̒̄̈́͐͂͐͘͘͜͝͠

Welcome! Honestly Lemmy is so chill and you don't feel sucked into it the way you do on Reddit.

One used to be able to disable the outbound click on Reddit, in the account settings, but default they track everything.

I've been here since the API changes at Reddit and the sub blackouts that followed, and I think it's becoming more interesting all the time. Back in the early days there was no point in refreshing the /all feed more than once every 4 hours as it just wouldn't have changed, now it's much more than that. The number of posts with actual discussions are increasing, and other than a few blocked users, communities and one instance, I like the people I'm sharing space with.

I also greatly prefer the people on Lemmy and I hope that continues even as more and more redditors show up. Without a spez calling the shots, perhaps instances will tend to ban and defederate from far-right radicalization chambers instead of promoting them to the front page.

Pretty much all of the far-right instances are defederated from the major servers, except lemm.ee, which intentionally lets users block instances they don't like.

I'll never stop complaining about Y axis that don't start at zero.

If that means the change isn't noticable, then the change isn't noticable.

Yeah when I showed the cop the graph of my speed before getting in my car to be 67000mph (speed of the earth around the sun) to 67080mphwhen I was driving it he couldn't see the difference so I didn't get the ticket.

Or sometimes choosing a common-sense reference makes sense.

Which isn't to say THIS one does, it doesn't, but the absolutism of "it's nerf or nothing" is a tad extreme.

Well, it does make sense, doesn't it?

What we're interested in is not the number of users, but the trends: whether the number is increasing or decreasing over time. Starting the axis at 0 would not be useful in this regard, as the trend would be almost completely obscured.

If the goal is to visualize growth trends, I don't think raw user counts are the correct value to track on the Y-axis at all. That's where my head was at when I said it doesn't make sense. Abusing the Y-axis to try and coax data out in this case is just a symptom of having the wrong measure.

Daily new users. Percent user growth.

There is visible growth in posts and comments, which is good. However, I've also started seeing spam posts.

For something like that, you need a special graph, and I forget the name because no one uses it.

Y axis is "percent growth" and the X axis isn't at the bottom, it's in the middle.

Like, the only way I can describe it is a line graph because it technically is, but there's some name done it.

Capitalism doesn't like it tho, because there's "red numbers" and red numbers scare investors

At some point recognisability is also worth something. I can immediately read this graph, I understand it, it's good.

Occasionally it's used in a confusing way where people assume it starts at zero despite it not being the case, and sometimes intentionally so. But that's just the case here.

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I'll never stop complaining about Y axis that don't start at zero.

If that means the change isn't noticable, then the change isn't noticable.

And pie charts with more than 3 segments

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I converted 3 friends. I'm doing my part.gif

My friends seem to prefer tolerating the official Reddit app because "there is more on Reddit". I'd rather have less for the time being and not lose my mind with that POS app not to mention fuck Reddit for what they did to 3rd party devs and users alike with that API change.

I refused to install the Reddit app out of principle other than just to check it out one time out of morbid curiosity. Without the 3rd party app creators that made apps long before Reddit did, back when Reddit wouldn't, Reddit probably wouldn't be anywhere as big as they are today. They brought new users in that likely wouldn't have used Reddit anywhere except on a mobile device and certainly not in a browser when even retail stores had their own apps.

When my 3rd party app (Boost) officially stopped working the other day I officially stopped being a Reddit user in the process. Not doing another hacky workaround to make the app work again. Time to make Lemmy my new social/forum and ditch Reddit except for when I need to do a Google search because Reddit is still a great archive of knowledge.

You’re not wrong. I do have the app because the mobile site shits on my browser (I have anti tracking, cookie blocking, ad wiping defences), and there are a few niche communities I find important that stick around (and r/sysadmin, while not exactly niche, is really useful for me)

Given the tech-oriented nature of Lemmy users, I'm surprised r/sysadmin doesn't have a Lemmy equivalent yet.

Hopefully it's real growth and not just "that guy" creating troll accounts, getting banned, and creating new accounts.

Or this guy: https://thelemmy.club/post/12652265

Activity seems to be up, not just users. It’s also active users, not just accounts

Lol I was thinking of this one when I saw the thread title. Still, I don't see a way to filter those out

Fuck reddit.

Feeding user data to an LLM. Jacking up API costs. Being generally unusable on mobile. Usurping old.reddit.com to try and force me to the official app on “unmoderated” and NSFW threads.

Now with their IPO and a need to deliver ever increasing subscriber numbers and improved metrics for shareholders every quarter, the writing is on the wall.

I hope it goes to zero. The only sad thing is all the knowledge that will be lost due to the sky high API pricing when the site eventually does sunset. I’m guilty myself of trying to de-enshittify google somewhat by adding reddit to just about every search. Hopefully people smarter than me have ways to archive that info.

Yes, but glue is the surprisingly tasty ingredient on pizza too keep your toppings from falling off.

Just be sure to use non-toxic glue, because the other kind tastes terrible.

I've been using Libreddit and now it's fork RedLib side by side with Lemmy. Haven't had too many problems, does seem to be a good way to access the knowledge you mentioned without specific api use (it runs in docker too) https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib

Feeding user data to an LLM.

I mean, somewhere, even if not now, if the Threadiverse becomes large enough, someone is gonna be using comments here to train an LLM too. That's just gonna be a given unless you want to use non-public forums, and that kills the searchability and accessbility to everyone that makes most forums valuable. It's even easier to access here than on Reddit -- just set up an instance and federate with and subscribe to everything.

I guarantee you that people are going back and training LLMs on archives of old Usenet discussions too.

The rest of it, yeah, I get.

I was word of mouthed here yesterday. As someone interested in self hosting and open source i might be the target audience sure, but I am here due to recent news and such

I've been spending my time both here and on Reddit recently, and I've honestly been enjoying it more here. Though I mostly lurk.

probably because reddit just broke the api clients again (including their own app).

This is fucking hilarious.

The entire time since that announcement last year dropped I have been using the modified Infinity for Reddit client that has my own API code in it.

I told myself if that stops working, whatever, I will not try to keep the app up to date and I will not switch apps. Lemmy works well enough for me now.

Up to this day the few times I have been accessing reddit through it I have no issues whatsoever. Amazing. Then again I never tried while they had issues with their official app, I suppose. Unless that is right now as I type this, because right now my app is still working fine.

They are also using automation to review comments that might harm their advertising partners. After 15 year a joke about Boeing got my account suspended. I deleted my top comments and closed it after that. Fucking trash. Now I only got to the site if Google search takes me there and with ad block enabled. Spez can suck it.

That's nice. Hopefully thanks to this outcome. More niche hobbyist community's will appear on lemmy And hopefully less auth left tankies I would like to see more posts and communities that bring more people together and not apart. Arts and crafts,Gaming,music,History,Exercise,Cooking,foraging Essentially the world's the oyster. There's a million hobbies out there I would hope there's a good amount of Lemmy communities based upon those hobbies

Lemmy hasn't really gotten over the fragmentation of communities. There are multiple gaming subs, some have double digit users, some have thousands. That shit needs to be consolidated.

Reddit is like that too though, games, gaming, videogames, gamers, pcgaming, etc.

True, but Lemmy doesn't have the number of users needed to populate so many subs.

I mean, some of those are fragmented for a reason. Like, !gaming@beehaw.org is pretty decent, but beehaw.org has a low bar for defederating from other instances, and has defederated from lemmy.world, which is the largest Lemmy instance, so anyone using lemmy.world as their home instance can't use that community.

Beehaw.org's not gonna refederate due to the split -- that was intentional. The people on !gaming@beehaw.org aren't gonna shut down their community, because they can't use !games@lemmy.world. Ditto for lemmy.world people on !games@lemmy.world; they can't use !gaming@beehaw.org.

I subscribe to and enjoy both communities.

I would like to see more posts and communities that bring more people together and not apart. Arts and crafts,Gaming,music,History,Exercise,Cooking,foraging Essentially the world’s the oyster. There’s a million hobbies out there I would hope there’s a good amount of Lemmy communities based upon those hobbies

Be the change you want to see - share interesting posts, start communities if you see a niche, etc.

What happened on March 3rd? (Mass increase in active users)

Oh man, and what happened on April 3rd? (Mass drop in average comments)

Did I miss a meeting where we decided to just have massive shifts on the 3rd of every month? Is something big happening now, am I missing it?

What happened on March 3rd? (Mass increase in active users)

LW updated to 19.3, which counts votes as activity (before, it was only comments and posts)

I've found I've been blocked on world news for posting comments againts fascist ideas. I've been shadow banned from world news for posting comprehensive evidence of china's crimes against humans aka their concentration camps. It wasn't opinion i linked to studies, and it wasn't inflammatory. My comments were removed and now i can't like or comment.

It's really disturbing ngl. I mean reddit was trash too but i expected some freedom of information here.

Was it the .ml or the .world instance? I had comments deleted for "misinformation" on .ml. It's why I migrated away from .ml because it was only a matter of time before my account was banned.

it was.ML yes .

You'll probably be happier at !world@lemmy.world instead.

I generally avoid communities on lemmy.ml where there are options elsewhere.

Yeah, I just blocked the .ml worldnews community. It isn't worth the effort trying to discuss politics with them. The .world instance has been fine for me so far.

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Wait......people on Lemmy.ml can ban your account site wide if you're not home to lemmy.ml? I don't know the right word for it. But I log into Lemmy.world. You're saying if I comment on a topic on a Lemmy.ml instance, the Lemmy.ml mods can ban the whole account site wide?

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For reference:

Modlog

He linked https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps

That's not allowed on lemmy.ml

New person here. What isn't allowed on Lemmy.ml? The linking of wikipedia?

Anything that speaks poorly of China, especially Wikipedia.

How did Lemmy.ml become the dominant userbase with those policies?

Lemmy.world is bigger, but Lemmy.ml.is the developers' instance, and gets the newest versions of Lemmy first.

It's also the oldest instance, I believe.

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There have been many times I've been blocked by subreddits just for posting an opinion that the moderators disagreed with. Moderators have way too much control over the website.

At least modlogs are public, so people can call them out about it

I linked to a lot of other studies im a separate comment too share that if we're being transparent

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Beside what is said, sometimes Lemmy appears in search results. It's a factor of growth.

No way really? That would be great. Can the Google crawlers reach Lemmy ? I always wondered

There was a post about it. And, I get Lemmy as result in my Google search multiple times.

People have to be willing to give things a try, so I think it will definitely grow. I was never a Reddit user, I tried this on a whim, just to try and have conversations with different people. The one good thing is that there are many functional apps, and you will only see things you are interested in, and when you don't, you down vote it.

But ultimately it's still the same echo chamber that all social media is, but without ads.

Don't downvote stuff just because you're not interested in it! There's no algorithm you're training, you're just being rude to people.

Downvotes should be for worthless content and people being dicks.

I run many small communities and it kills me when people from “all” downvote stuff.

If you don’t care about the topic, block the community or skip the posts

Correct. If you don't like the content in the community, then why be there? Just join things that interest you, no need to be a 💩

I agree - no algorithm - but if someone is posting 💩 then it's 💩 they get. Hey if I post 💩 I would fully expect that. Lol

All social media, and irl too, has biases. As we do ofc - e.g. we linux Linux, especially Arch btw:-P - but it seems to me that the Fediverse is fundamentally different, b/c of the nature of consent.

On Facebook, YouTube, Twitter/X, and Reddit now that it is acting more like the former, ThE aLgOrItHm makes choices for you, whereas here if you want to create an echo chamber, you have to put in a LOT of effort to ensure that you are never exposed to anything that you would disagree with.

For one thing, you would have to subscribe to communities first, and those would have to have enough content to hold your interest, which means a continual search for more of such communities. Scrolling through the All feed would absolutely be prohibited if you wanted to make an echo chamber for yourself.

Again, literally every social media platform has biases, but here those do not rise to the level of "echo chamber", imho? I do concede that it is not entirely unlike one of those, and yet on the spectrum, aren't we far less than most other common platforms?

I think it's really easy to make an echo chamber here, make a community and only follow said community? I enjoy Lemmy, because look,we are having legitimate conversations, but some posts I have come across - it's like no conversation, just putting down an opposite point of view.

Me personally, I do my best to try and avoid the political stuff, but even that is difficult at times.

But yes, subscribe to the communities and if the content is there, great, if not, make some or help promote it.

Okay so it is theoretically possible but is it plausible that this could be a common use-case?

Anyway, you said "it’s still the same echo chamber that all social media is" - and that statement goes far beyond using the Fediverse as an echo chamber to say that it is that way for everyone (further implication: all the time). i.e. the most command-language interpretation of your words would be that they meant that that tiny little theoretical possibility is what this place is, therefore I wanted to point out that there is so much more to consider, e.g. there are other ways to use it.

Lemmy W. I hope more people join.

Why?

I kinda like how I often quickly run out of new interesting posts to comment on, but there is enough that I can have engaging conversations.

The more people that come the more it gets watered down. Not that I am gatekeeping, people can do as they like. Just I am happy right now.

Edit: Curious about the downvotes. Considering I explicitly said I’m not trying to gate keep and people can do as they please.

I wouldn't find twice the number of people, so that a few niche communities get more activity.

!football@lemmy.world for instance is pretty quiet with how popular the sport is.

Also a few "real life" communities like !parenting@lemmy.world and !personalfinance@lemmy.ml would benefit from more activity

I just subbed to all three of those.

I find half the battle here is finding new places to sub to. I’ll browse all but always forget to sub to new ones I see.

I think for sports, it’s difficult as it seems most of us early adopters here are, well let’s say nerdier than the average, and as a rule tend to follow sport less.

Even me, I wouldn’t go out of my way to watch sport, aside from the olympics. But as an introvert that had a shitty home life I learnt quickly how to be a fake extrovert and thus had a lot of friends and so got surrounded by sport and stuff.

I find half the battle here is finding new places to sub to.

At the moment, none of Lemmy -- and AFAIK, kbin/mbin/etc -- or any of the clients provide a native way to search all of the Threadiverse. Some of that is kind of intrinsic to the distributed design, intended to help it scale, let instances be small if required. An instance doesn't track all the activity on all the instances out there.

However, if you go to lemmyverse.net, they have a list of all of the communities across all of the instances on the Threadiverse. You can search and filter by various criteria.

https://lemmyverse.net/communities

I really think that that should be the starting point for most users.

You can search for communities across all federated instances by clicking on "All" in the communities page: https://lemmy.ml/communities?listingType=All

That only shows you the communities that your particular instance knows about. But it's not even all communities over all federated instances.

An instance only "knows" about a community on another instance once both (a) it has federated with the other instance and (b) someone has explicitly triggered a search for "!communityname@remoteinstancename" on an instance. Like, that community doesn't get added to the list of known communities on federated instances just because someone has created it.

For example, take bbs.9tail.net, a small lemmy instance.

You can see that that it's federated with lemmy.world on its instances page:

https://bbs.9tail.net/instances

And it's only blocked a single instance, lemmygrad.ml.

But (as of this writing, and that could change if someone goes and starts triggering searches for stuff on there), it only has two pages of communities, with 63 (in a quick count) known. There are far more than 63 communities on lemmy.world alone, not to mention on all the other instances that bbs.9tail.net is federated with.

Lemmyverse.net, on the other hand, crawls all the instances it can find and builds a full index. Currently has over 27,000 communities. Once you get a "!community@instance" name from there, you can trigger a search for it on your home instance, and your home instance will learn about it. But until you or someone else does that, your home instance won't know about that community.

The hardware communities are not active enough. We need more people who are interested in niche topics

Because almost all niche topic communities that i am interested in have very few people posting. The niche topics were also what made reddit interesting to me, i hardly ever browsed all there.

Find a smaller instance with similar interests or views, and scroll by local!

The increase in monthly is just mainly replacing users leaving as the active 6 month seems to be going down the same rate as active monthly is going up. Am I reading that correctly?

Total users doesn't concern me too badly, as I'm more happy to see daily post and comment counts going up. I feel activity needs to be our focus rather than headcount. A packed stadium is kinda pointless if nobody is on stage putting on the show! 😁

The increase in monthly is just mainly replacing users leaving as the active 6 month seems to be going down the same rate as active monthly is going up. Am I reading that correctly?

Yeah. But the active 6 month is a lagging indicator because it tracks users who became inactive 6 months ago. While the increase in monthly active users is tracking users joining right now. If the increase of monthly active users is sustained for a few months, it'll reverse the 6 month trend as well.

Totally agree that it's ultimately about activity, but the reality is that we need more users to have more activity. I always took for granted the sheer scale of reddit until I joined Lemmy. It takes a massive number of people to sustain continuous 24/7 discussion about a wide variety of topics, which is ultimately what this kind of link aggregator/forum strives to do. And Lemmy users are already really active compared to redditors. There just aren't enough of us yet.

I try to put a lot of emphasis on encouraging new posters and commenters. I don't get why you'd come to the "wild west" of social media to just be solely a lurker. You should want to be an explorer and a settler, forging that new frontier. I won't hate on the lurkers, they will always be the majority, but why deal with the quirk, less ease of use, and less content to not want to help shape what it becomes?

I came over intending to lurk, hence my crap username, but what I wanted wasn't here, but I didnt want to crawl back to Reddit, so I started building, and it's great. People are friendly, you have less competition for attention, and the userbase is largely supportive of whatever you do because you're doing something.

But ultimately, as long as we arent on an extended downswing, we're doing well. I'll keep making posts and giving positive feedback, so hopefully it keeps catching new people with the bug to interact.

I genuinely do believe that we are starting to see some organic growth.

I've been obsessed with Lemmy for the past year; I used to mostly lurk during my 10 year reddit career but everything changed over here, partially because I felt like my voice was really being heard.

And I have noticed an increase in activity in the past month, with posts and comments receiving more upvotes and engagement. It sounds like you've also been making the most of your Lemmy experience, which is great.

I sometimes try to spread the word about Lemmy on reddit and people are so toxic in the way that they deal with the smaller userbase and lesser activity. So many people that love to whine and complain, instead of realizing that Lemmy is an incredible opportunity/concept at an early/imperfect stage.

it was nice seeing some gardening stuff pop up in my feed the other day rather than just a constant stream of facebook tier memes and tankie vs non-tankie arguing

So many Mastodon server, crazy. The Lemmy experience is so much better than Mastodon, strange that this is the major draw. Is it because of Meta?

One works like a forum, the other is a microblogging platform. Definitely not the same userbase.

Mastodon is much older as a software. Lemmy is still under active development, we aren't even on version 1 yet

Still hang around both. But I've noticed I've had more to engage with on Lemmy lately, which is great.

As long as it doesn't become Reddit 2.0.

It will if Lemmy becomes successful. It will have to stay tiny and very niche. Or else all communities have to deal with Eternal September if they start getting a lot of users. Then communities will gravitate towards the same lowest common denominator content and comments seen elsewhere.

Nah, that's the whole point of federation. To keep it from becoming Reddit. The problem with Reddit isn't that it's big, it's that it's highly censored on a wide variety of topics that aren't anywhere near offensive but simply counter to Western hegemony.

It won't. Some instances will get close, like Lemmy.world, but federation makes Lemmy fundamentally different.

What’s a “green server”?

I'd assumed it was servers running on renewable power, although I'm not sure how they measure that. I know some hosting companies and CDNs have that as an option, but I don't see how you'd know if each server chose that option so I guess it's more like "servers with green hosting companies".

So there's 5 million new posts per day, or posts total? Assuming the latter except the sudden drop in #s is a little weird.

I would like to see a participation per capita breakdown. IOW who posts the most per person relative to the number of participants. Edit: by country and community.

There's an adage about fixating on popularity as a measure of worth.

I just found out Lemmy is blocking and removing users for having varied political opinions that don't line up with their forceful left ideals. So I'm out. This was a waste of time.

Switch instances?

Would it be much better do you think? I've heard others are worse, but I am not sure of them all. I can look into it. I just want people to be able to have open, civil conversations without being silenced by biased mods.

If you have an issue with a given community, find or start an alternative one on another instance. If you have an issue with how your instance deals with anyone, sign up for a different instance.

I urge you to consider this before giving up on Lemmy entirely, it's kind of the beauty of the federated services.

Agreed, there are lots of instances, and that may be one thing that allows Lemmy to actually have space for different political leanings. As I understand, conservative circles are not very large here, but that can change, and smaller communities generally are healthier. Check those out and recruit your pals- be the change you want to see in the world!

Can you say where you got this idea? I see a lot of conservative opinions considering the entire idea behind this platform was conceived and executed by far-leftists.

SeveralAnts is upset that eight copy-paste comments of theirs were removed by a mod from one comment section on !worldnews, each containing the exact same misinformation which implied that Mexican drug cartels had 37 presidential candidates assassinated in order to leave one lone candidate, a Jewish leftist scientist, as the cartels' preferred candidate. This is a lie. While a few dozen Mexican politicians have been assassinated this election cycle, none of them were presidential candidates.

What SeveralAnts is upset about is that their attempts at spreading lies in order to promote their anti-leftist agenda failed. To that, I say to them good fucking riddance. Go back to Twixxer.

Couldn't you just move to another lemmy instance? or host your own?

This is true but I've found I've been blocked on world news for posting comments againts fascist ideas. I've been shadow banned from world news for posting comprehensive evidence of china's crimes against humans aka their concentration camps. It wasn't opinion i linked to studies, and it wasn't inflammatory. My comments were removed and now i can't like or comment.

It's really disturbing ngl.

Your situation is different from that of the person to whom you are replying. SeveralAnts is upset that eight copy-paste comments of theirs were removed by a mod from one comment section on !worldnews, each containing the exact same misinformation which implied that Mexican drug cartels had 37 presidential candidates assassinated in order to leave one lone candidate, a Jewish leftist scientist, as the cartels' preferred candidate. This is a lie. While a few dozen Mexican politicians have been assassinated this election cycle, none of them were presidential candidates.

What SeveralAnts is upset about is that their attempts at spreading lies in order to promote their anti-leftist agenda failed. To that, I say good fucking riddance. Go back to Twixxer.

Interesting -- me too. OP misunderstood you and thought you're a conservative. lol

Thank you so much for commenting this. I thought I was going crazy. World News seems to be the culprit. It isn't fair to the users to deny information. I think I'm going to leave, it is too disturbing. I don't need this.

I would suggest rather than entirely leaving the Threadiverse, just leaving that community and joining the !world@lemmy.world community.

Yeah i just blocked that community, but really shit we have dickheads like this ruining lemmy with arbitrary censorship.

Really no different than Reddit in that regard. At least we don't have people automatically banning you for having ever interacted with specific other communities yet, at least I don't think we do yet.

EDIT: Shit, somehow I forgot the don't. Teach me not to proofread.