There is a drop in monthly active Lemmy users (from 65k to 57k)
lemmy.fediverse.observer
It is probably due to a number of people stopping using their alts after some instance hopping.
Also a few people who came to see how it was, and weren't attracted enough to become regular visitors.
Curious to see at which number we'll stabilize.
Next peak will probably happen after either major features release (e.g. exhaustive mod tools allowing reluctant communities to move from Reddit) or the next Reddit fuck up (e.g. removing old.reddit)
Stats on each server: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
Maybe it’s because the content here just isn’t as vast. I’m nkt going back to reddit for awhile, but there’s so little to see on lemmy to me. Despite numerous subscriptions, I see very few memes and far too much political content. Of that political content it’s all the same. Sometimes this place feels like a hive-mind. Not that Reddit wasn’t, but it depended on the sub. Now it’s shaped by instance and everything here just feels stale
That's funny because the meme subs still far outpace posting from politics subs for me, and I mostly see memes.
In fact, a few weeks ago, there were lots of complaints in meme comments of how the only thing they saw on the site was memes.
Memes may be thriving but niche interest communities can't even get off the ground.
So just like reddit 14 years ago when I first left Digg for greener pastures. When I joined, it was years before my local city subreddit sprang to life, and for years, it had around 1000 active accounts and only now has over 10k accounts.
Man, if the people on reddit back in the day had sat around complaining about lack of content like this, the site would have died. Instead they started making fucking content.
It takes time for communities to grow, and it feels like a lot of the folks who left reddit only ever knew reddit as a ready-made-community filled with thousands of people already. As in, they were latecomers and missed all the slow growth.
Maybe I need to be on ml then. I feel like world is just full of the same.
I quite like beehaw and their communities, and yeah, you're missing out on those if you're on world, from what I understand. (Fairly sure they're still defederated.)
I personally like lemmy.ml, but I know it's not for everyone, and the admins would prefer to keep it a smaller instance, I think. I'm only here because there weren't as many federated servers three years ago when I made an account.
You also might check out !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone, they flood my feed with good memes.
I blocked 196 because it was just shitty memes being spammed
196 is amazing
Just gotta follow The Rule
Kbin is a nice alternative. Content cycles out of Hot a lot faster on here.
You also get microblogging support on here, so you have access to the Mastodon side of the fediverse as well without having to copy and paste links.
Try out Kbin, as well. Personally I have none of the usual Lemmy complaints
Are there any decent iOS apps for kbin yet? I almost never browse these sites on desktop (hence why I have completely left Reddit since Apollo died).
Currently using Memmy on iOS which is great.
Kbin doesn't have an api yet, so apps aren't supported (there are some in the works though for when the api goes public). In the meantime, you can install the pwa through a browser.
Even the memes are pretty stale, definitely not dank. Many of these memes are reposts of stuff I saw years ago on Reddit.
Where are you even looking? My timeline is flooded with memes all the damn time. They're practically drowning out any posts of value at this point.
Been saying this for months. No one seems to understand what made reddit grow, and it is ironically very much like /r/place when you get down to it:
Reddit was a singular canvas that all users worked on together. Posts, comments, and voting shaped the site as a whole. The front page of Reddit was the result of it's userbase, and it's userbase was diverse. Because Reddit forced all users, of all backgrounds and ideologies, to exist together in the same space, and work on the same canvas, it created something living and varied.
You may not have ever gotten along with people from a certain subreddit in th comments, but I promise, the two of you worked together at one point to get a post to the front page or a comment to the top, and you didn't even know it. Thos little moments where diametrically opposed people shared a liking of something by how they voted. On the surface, everyone bickered. Under the hood, they were all unknowingly agreeing and cooperating all the time, and that was what powered reddit's engine: it's diverse userbase's activity.
That's why gated communities like Tildes and all these curated instances will never reach Reddit levels: they are starving the engine.
The phrasing here kinda implies this is a bad thing and everyone should be focused on 🚀 constant growth 🚀.
Tildes in particular has an extreme focus on quality over quantity and has some really interesting ideas on moderation (that haven't been implemented due to lack of time on Deimos' part). The site is still considered an alpha after all this time.
I think the default activity sort is part of the problem. Sorting by activity means everyone is just looking at and engaging with the same topics for 24 hours or so. There needs to be some "hot" category or something so that new stuff gets churned through a bit more regularly. New is too new, top is even more stale, activity causes things with high activity to stay high. It makes for very samey content.
Hot exists, doesn't it?
In my experience, Active and Hot have been opposite extremes of freshness. Active shows posts that are more than a day old, and Hot shows posts that have no comments and are just a couple of minutes old.
Not to say it's all bad. Your post was just a couple of scrolls down on my feed.
Have they finally fixed this to not show old posts out of nowhere in the "Hot" feed? I've been avoiding this sorting because of that and hadn't read anything about it being corrected... yet.
I don't remember if it was fixed in 18.3 or 18.4, but it has been for a while.
Worth giving it a try, even if your instance is still 18.3
Ooo! I will, thanks!
This is what is turning me off from lemmy, worst of it I see a lot of shitty political memes, it wasn't this bad at the beginning of the reddit exodus.
And then there isn't seem to be a neutral instance, I was in world and then they banned the piracy community, I moved to lemm.ee and all I see is stupid hexbear posts, I appreciate that they don't defederate willy nilly but Lemmy urgently needs the block instance feature from user level.
Noted! Good feedback.
The cope is strong. Let’s not pretend fewer active users is a good thing. It just means people are unhappy and are leaving.
If the stats are accurate then this is not necessarily due to people being unhappy and leaving as both comments and posts are still stable - indicating that the lower active count are lurkers, duplicates or otherwise non engaging accounts.
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
That said, you can come up with statistics to prove anything! Forfty percent of all people know that.
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if duplicate accounts are a part of this but that seems like it would be a natural part of growing pains for lemmy. The way the fediverse is built would suggest that people who are serious about long-term participation may bounce around a bit. For example, I joined in June but in that time I still managed to test out two other instances before settling on a third that seemed to strike the ideal balance between admin policies and reliable uptime to suit my needs.
Yup if I hadn't blocked several communities from appearing constantly in my feed, I would leave too.
Right. Everything negative about Lemmy is being turned into a positive for some reason. Truth is this is still a difficult concept for a lot of people to get on board with and the overall reliability of instances leaves much to be desired. All we need to do is continue to contribute and see what takes off.
But just remember: Some of those people that are not staying are the types of people you wouldn't want to interact with anyway. If the roughly 10k people who quit were Nazis (for example), it's a good thing.
But they obviously aren't all Nazis
Hmm... I think we need to conduct some exit interviews to gather data before we start making any assumptions.
About as useful as the 'have you ever or are you planning to participate in a genocide' tickbox on immigration forms.
Although there's a troubling part of me that worries that Nazism has been normalised enough that people would willingly say yes.
Exploding heads is literally shutting down. So he may have a point.
Yeah, I tend to think that most of the people who left wouldn’t be valuable members of the community anyway. Maybe they’re too impatient to deal with software that isn’t fully mature, maybe they can’t deal with the fact that most Lemmy instances are somewhere between leftish and outright communism, or maybe the somewhat chaotic nature of the fediverse turns them off. Whatever. I hope they find something that suits them.
I also hope, for their own sake, that the “something” doesn’t involve going back to reddit.
As I said in a comment below, I would like this to be a signal for interest groups to choose one of the dozens communities they have, stick to one and make it grow.
Looking at gaming or books, always seems detrimental to have the . world, .ml, .sh.itjust.works and so on with the same content posted everywhere.
There is no infinite doomscroll on Lemmy and that's what I used to do on Reddit. Now, I just read the top headlines and touch grass :)
The reason I'm still here instead of there is that I absolutely can't use their official app. I just can't. It's so awful. Lemmy isn't perfect but at least it isn't that. So I do spend less time doom scrolling and that's probably good for me.
Same here, I actually have a much healthier relationship with social media when on Lemmy vs Reddit. That might change as Lemmy grows in user content but for now I’ll enjoy the quieter experience
There is a middle ground between "infinite doomscrolling" and just barren. I miss a lot of communities I used to browse on Reddit and they aren't taking roots here. Losing more people isn't a good sign.
That will change soon enough.
I agree, I finish up my daily feed (at the moment I am subscribed to 628 communities).
Precisely. And maybe bring the grass to Lemmy a little bit
E: see my posts
lemmy.world being down half the time probably made a lot of people think that this platform is trash and left.
The number of times Lemmy.world was down made it unusable for me to use. Switched to Lemdro.id and it's so much better now.
I am on Lemm.ee and haven't had a single issue
lemmy.ml was also down recently for half a day or so. But lemmy.ml was never knwon for being reliable, even it it works fine since some time now.
Tbh it did affect me, I had just joined and it was out often, & it seemed like a hassle (being new) to find and join new instances or w/e especially when I had to create a new account for every one. Didn't necessarily think it was trash just buggy and unreliable especially for that to be happening during such a big migration (after Reddit changed the api's)
Idk it's nice here but that did reduce my usage. Something that I'm new on being down for a day or two means I'm less likely to use it the next day and incorporate it into my daily routine
I think a good third of what I have typed or posted so far on Lemmy has never succeeded as submitting them would cause it to stop responding and never compete. Refreshing will bring the page back up and allow me comment, but it'll not work most the time.
Their downtime has been pretty severe... growing pains, I get it, but it's not just that.
After several attempts at retyping it all, then trying to copy and paste to try to post again just got to me a bit. It's taking a lot out of me as I'm personally struggling in life to try to communicate with people, with it being flakey all the time, it's feels like when you have to repeat yourself, then just give up.
It's a shame because I wanted to post in me communities, but I couldn't. I keep seeing "View reply" on my comments, but they frequently never load or just vanish. I do wonder if they're broken/incomplete replies.
you should have left lemmy.world a month ago. those issues dont happen elsewhere
You should probably move instance.
https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim can be useful
And at the beginning everyone was worried about "Eternal September". It's only been two months.
People will come in waves, instances and communities will grow and die, just like how it was on reddit, we'll probably start seeing meme/politics free or even more specialized instances soon. But all of this is going to take time.
The turning point will be when companies/websites start spinning up their own Lemmy instances as their official one to replace their forums, which I think will happen.
So, being on Lemmy is a long term investment for me.
Same for me, good to still see you around
Hopefully this works out, gotta get that first mover advantage in, then Lemmy's only real celebrity will be recognized as the marketing genius that she is. :)
I like Lemmy better when it's when it's nicer and quieter a month ago honestly.
Are you the actual Margot Robbie? Seen your profile before, but just assumed it was someone who liked them and was capitalizing on the movie.
If Margot Robbie were to be here, we would have 50x more people around
And have the paparazzi scrutinize me over every single dumb comment I ever post here? No thanks.
If I wanted that, I would have just got a Twitter with a blue checkmark, and I really don't like Twitter.
Well, the movie promotion ended early due to the strike, so I'm just shitposting and having fun here now.
It's good to keep plausibile deniability. I don't want to get bad PR in case things don't work out.
No one will ever believe you anyways.
Ha ha :)
Same feeling here, browsing All now is cumbersome due to the low quality of the average content dropping
Yeah, so that's why I'm expecting way more alt hopping and defederations and people splitting into smaller groups soon until everything finally settles.
One of advantage of the fediverse honestly that it prevents powertripping mods, since it's so easy to move to another community on the same topic on a different instance with different admins and mods, and while a person can be banned off a particular comm or instance, they can't be banned from Lemmy as a whole, so reputation matters a lot more right now when everybody kinda knows each other here.
Yeah, lemmy seems like a great alternative to discourse.
I'm getting pretty tired of the obvious "Big tech company bad, Twitter dead, Linux good" bias that Lemmy seems to have. It's definitely decreased my usage over the last week or two. I guess it kind of comes with the territory given Lemmy is a more complicated platform that will naturally attract more tech-oriented users, but it's still getting super old seeing the same flavor posts every single day.
The biggest issue for me is the stale posts keep showing on my feed. Either the posts are too old, or it's too new with low engagement. I think the sweet spot for me is when a post is in its 1/3 of its lifecycle. Already got a discussion going but not too far that I can't engage meaningfully.
I find sorting by 'Top' either 6 hours or 12 hours helps me see new posts I've not seen that have decent engagement
Add Firefox in there and yes I've seen this everywhere. So many posts about browser news or the web that just devolves into a circlejerk about how great Firefox is.
I get it with the others, but given what Google is currently trying to do with Chrome and the open web, I think the Firefox evangelism is the least sinful of these by far. Or maybe I just became part of the problem.
This is exactly my issue with Lemmy in all honesty.
Post more my dude. Start the conversations you want to see.
I browse social media to find new ideas that I can't think of.
Yeah but it's like screaming into the void sometimes. You just hope more people somehow discover the community. A lot of my interesting communities are pretty much dead now, so I just subbed to a bunch of porn and get on here once a day to look at boobs.
I agree. The FOSS movement is its own subculture that can be pretty preachy and annoying for outside people.
Also let's not forget the Hexbear "Russia is good actually" posts.
Switching between "Active" and "Top [1h/6h/12h]" at different times of the day has provided me with enough content & interactions to make Lemmy my new home. I always was a lurker on the old site, no comment nor post, not even an account. Now, I'm slowly trying to break from this habit. Being on Lemmy feels like I'm not shouting in the void; when a platform gets too big, you get lost in the crowd. It's always nice to see recurring usernames on different communities.
It always dies down after the initial hype. It seems pretty stable now. Compare it to pre-exodus and it is still like hundreds of times more popular then before.
It honestly feels nice because the activity feels human and not just spammy low-effort comments 0:
This is one of the main things keeping a lot of us around I think. It's not just repost bots of shit I've seen 5 times in a month.
Yeah, still we lack variety because our algo doesn't do a good job of promoting smaller communities. I'd like a lot more niche subs get more popular rather then our few dozen or so that have gotten big, which is still a good thing don't get me wrong.
https://feddit.nl/c/trendingcommunities is pretty useful!
!trendingcommunities@feddit.nl
That I agree with, the other thing that kills me is multiple communities of the same topic just in different servers.
V true. I will say seeing the same post across 5 instances does make me feel like I'm going crazy sometimes so I guess it's a tradeoff xD
I feel that you underestimate how stubborn I can be with low effort comments. I've been making off color, not particularly funny attempted witty comebacks on BBSes, the Internet, and then the World Wide Web for longer than... Oh, it's been since the early 90's now. Lemmy is the latest stomping grounds and I'm not giving up here just yet.
Been a little hard to get used to, but I've mostly transitioned over from reddit, like I went to it from Digg.
Been using the Connect apk for my phone and everything seems pretty nice with it.
I hope this means all the reddit liberals are leaving
I dropped off because I am unbelievably sick of seeing the same thing posted across 20 different communities. No matter which sort I am using, my front page is CLUTTERED with the same crap.
Trump, Trump, Elon, shitty meme, trump, Elon, Elon, capitalism bad, shitty meme.
Repeat
There should be an option for communities to form unions between them of some sort, or at least a client-side option to combine communities into a single big one
more discussion about this https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
and https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113
That makes sense, thank you for your feedback
Never really had that issue. Are you referring to you sub feed or all? If the issue is all maybe start blocking the duplicates that you deem unworthy of your time.
The lack or rudimentary algorithms lemmy has compared to corporate social media is both good and bad. Less dopamine/doom scrolling but you also have to curate the feed a bit to make it work for you.
Pretty sure it's going to just be like 12 of us. If the third party app thing on reddit didn't drive users here, unfortunately I don't think anything else will. At this point if you are already content with the reddit app it's going to be a hard sell to say, yeah come check out Lemmy, it's like reddit but if you have a question about your sick betta fish instead of getting a helpful answer in a few minutes, you need to first create a betta fish community, then go back on reddit and recruit users to your Lemmy community. Post content on it daily to maintain interest, and then, if you are really lucky, ask your question and wait a few months and maybe if your fish is still alive (doubtful), you might get a response, but it will probably be just be an anticapitalist shit-post. I'm sorry to say it is this way, but this be the way that it is.
Hexbear has been very active for 3 years before we even federated. There's plenty of room for growth. We're not going to become reddit (and that's a good thing) but acting like it's just going to die (or is already dead) is just ridiculous
I'm fine with 12 of us if everyone is active.
Hopefully by then we'll have a few active communities and not hundreds of ghost towns like now
Bruh. I'm in group chats with people I know IRL with more than 12 people.
Long time hexbear user, I've actually had pretty good luck getting input on non-political questions. No sick fish, but I've asked quite a variety of questions and gotten help. Maybe I would have gotten a higher quality answer on Reddit, but my experience with modern reddit (last 6ish years) has been hit or miss. Reminds me in a way of the forums I used back in the really 2000s. Even though the forums I was on were primarily oriented around tabletop gaming, the "general/off-topic" sections would have quite a variety of people and interests. And those people, since they all had a common interest, were far more talkative and generous with their time than what I've experienced in Reddit. IMO this makes up for the smaller population. Hexbear has that vibe for me, just with a non-sectarian socialist shitposting focus. Which works for me.
Summed up my feelings too. Reddit's larger communities were trash, but for really specific questions, it was unbeatable. Not to mention the fact that most Lemmy pages are either tech-related or tankie propaganda. There's very little in the way of active hobby/lifestyle boards so unless you're in either a nerd (non-derogatory) or a communist (derogatory), Lemmy's not got much going on for you
Well, i am here directly due to reddit policy changes. The loss of a viable mobile option forced me here. I can't believe I am not an average case. I am enjoying this experience so far and will definitely spread the word. But i will continue to use reddit on the computer... I am surprised that there are only 60,000 of us here though.
There are many fatal problems on Lemmy, worst of all is you can't click this link /c/books and see every /c/book on every Lemmy instance of the fediverse. This is out of convenience to moderators and it is killing Lemmy. One people figure out communities only exist on a single instance, the promise of federation is broken and they fuck off.
Very good point-a way of connecting communities on Reddit that seems fairly innocuous but is actually a massive means of the "transmission" of users between communities, allowing users to find communities they like quicker and thus making them more likely to stay.
Very good point that I didn't think of tbh.
See https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3033 It's won'tfix/notabug
but there is this https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
and https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113
expired
Why do you think communities with the same name will have the same content?
I would love to see something like this where it shows you content from communities with the same name across whatever your server is federated with.
There is no way for a user to block whole instances, there is no way to know if you've been banned from a community or instance, it's extremely easy for people to evade bans and blocks, you can't make private communities, armies of extremists are brigading other instances and they're exploiting Lemmy's flaws to do it, the list goes on and on.
Lemmy blows, but give the rubes time. They'll figure it out.
It crazy how these people can get their bs to show up in my main feed, and then if I comment on it they call me a troll
JFC there's only 60k of us? And that's a good thing? 😳
It does explain why all the niche communities I visit have gone from quiet to abandoned.
That and the sorting at this time really doesn't allow for niche communities to grow.
This is one of the biggest issues with Lemmy right now.
I'm gonna keep holding out cause I hope that Lemmy will have improvements like sorting algorithms and mod tools and such, users have stabilized.
If the users keep going down I might have to go back to Reddit, a man can only laugh at the same Linux meme so many times.
Same and I hate that I would have to go back to reddit. I like that I can have decent conversations here but I also miss being able to talk about niche shows I like and quote things with people. The niche interests that Reddit offers isn't really on Lemmy.
Like I'm also no longer keeping up with my favorite radio show cause they have a sub Reddit and the people who listen to that show, aren't the kind of people who can just switch over to Lemmy. They don't know the first thing about changing platforms.
I already talked to someone else on here on providing my own content and being the change I want to see. But I've found so many communities where its just one person posting into the void and there's lots of posts from like a month ago and zero comments on every single one. Some communities seem to be just people posting news links to other sites. Which makes Lemmy seem like a directory- not a community.
Yeah, it's not a good thing and I'm getting sick of people on here trying to gaslight themselves into thinking it is. The same people saying that this is good are also mocking X and threads for losing users. Nobody's claiming that's good for those platforms.
We want growth, more users and more instances is better for Lemmy overall.i don't buy this arguments of "people are just not using their alts", I mean fuck off, that statement was pulled from OP's arse with nothing to back it up.
This drop in users is natural though - not every person that got here with a hype train was expected to stay here, just like users who joined Lemmy just to wait until protests are over. Some users may switched from lemmy to kbin and are still with us, just using another software.
Before the exodux Lemmy was really empty. That's why people are so optimistic about the future of the threadiverse.
These are not comparable. X and threads are businesses which maximize their profits by making their platform as big as possible. That is not true for Lemmy and even if it were, the average user does not care about the platform's profits. So you can in fact make fun of the failures of big companies while being happy being part of a much smaller platform.
Also Lemmy is becoming a larger platform and Twitter- or "X"- is becoming a smaller platform. Sure total users might be down since right after the Exodus but that is obviously normal, a new baseline will be established that's still significantly above the pre Exodus baseline. Then reddit inc will do something else stupid and people on the site will be talking about Lemmy again.
I think there's positives and negatives to having a small platform, and there's positives and negatives to having a larger platform. With a smaller platform, the quality of the comments in general is much higher with less low effort jokes which usually you've already read 500 times. With larger platforms, the smaller communities are much more active because there's a larger pool to draw those people with niche interests from.
The average user cares about the health and quality of the platform though and a declining user-base is not good for either of those.
Sure, we don't want to be flooded with millions of users either but that's because we have a distinct lack of mod tools and features to deal with it. The solution is better tools and better ways of handling those users, not to keep the platform isolated and haemorrhaging users.
Some subs on Reddit were practically unusable due to the amount of users and the noise they created. Especially if you weren't in an American timezone so missed the early chatter before everyone piled on. I've come to appreciate less users being here.
There's a happy medium between sitting in an empty bar and eternal summer.
When there's too much people on the social media site, it becomes noisy and unfriendly. I can't remember any subreddit with more than 20k users being any good.
Quality > quantity
Yes, but larger variety of active communities is better overall.
True, but it will be better overall with a small growth, not what we saw during reddit exodus. And this drop is just a logical end of this rapid migration, and now we'll see a slow but stable growth in Lemmy usage.
If we had been 60,000 strong at Helmsdeep, Rohan would have fallen
@itadakimasu
> there’s only 60k of us? And that’s a good thing?
A centralised platform is a numbers game. The money for upgrading servers for growth has to come from one company, and if the platform shrinks it gets harder to get a return on that spending.
It just doesn't matter as much in a federated network. The cost of growth is spread across many servers. Some of which will end up shutting down, for a range of reasons. But others have room for growth.
(1/2)
@Blaze @Kushan @patatahooligan
@itadakimasu
Plus, the Lemmy servers are part of a much larger network; the fediverse. Not just other forum apps like KBin either. Right now I'm replying to this from Mastodon.
I have an alt on a .nz Lemmy server, but haven't got into the habit of using it yet. So at least some of the perceived shrinkage *is* due to that, rather than any failure of the network. Also due to spam and troll accounts being purged.
(2/2)
@Blaze @Kushan @patatahooligan
These numbers are not descriptive. Check out the daily stats.
Source: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=120
If people were coming in, shouldn't the monthly active users increase as well?
If the MAU is decreasing, it means that we are losing more people than people joining. On your graph, the MAU trend is clearly decreasing.
Maybe I'm missing something?
People are going out faster than they're coming in.
Regardless of where the loss in users is coming from the major takeaway here is that we are firmly in a reinvestment phase. This will likely last until Reddit does something stupid related to the IPO but in the absence of that we will probably not see a significant uptick in growth again without major improvements to the threadiverse as a whole. That means that those of us who are personally invested in the growth of the threadiverse should be taking this time to develop the tools and features necessary to weather the next wave more gracefully than the last.
One of the biggest issue I see here is still community growth. Growing certain communities is significantly harder than others and if you don't have a lot of crossposting potential it can be damn near impossible. As it stands, I do not see a way to fix this situation without a hot and active ranking system that takes into account the number of users active in the particular community. As part of a change like this I think we would be best served by consolidating a significant portion of the small dead communities. I think we should also strongly prefer specialized instances like lemmy.film or literature.cafe to truly take advantage of the special attention these sorts of instances are capable of providing particular topics. As it stands only a handful of them have enough broader threadiverse activity to be truly useful.
Another thing I would like to suggest is a change in recruitment strategy. At this point it seems like we are unlikely to pull a significant amount of users from Reddit without more reddit-policy-driven migration, but there are tons of highly educated and engaged users over on Mastodon that would make serious positive contributions to the tone and quality of the discourse over here. For some reason there seems to be minimal overlap between the two communities and that blows my mind. Not only that but I actively see folks disparaging Mastodon in fediverse related communities on a regular basis (and even sometimes in the Mastodon communities themselves). As far as I can tell, these are largely lingering sentiments from a Reddit/Twitter dichotomy. Remember, as things develop the lines between threaded social media and microblogging are likely to blur. A significant number of Mastodon apps already provide a threaded view and one of kbins explicit goals is very much to bridge the gap. With this in mind, Mastodon (and federated microblogging more generally) seems like the best source for new potential users.
Definitely
The small comms I'm subscribed to don't show up in any sorting, I have to actually visit them to see there was a new post. I heard the devs are doing something to improve it, so hopefully that'll make small comms more viable
A thing to look out for is that the microblog fedi (outside the big handful of instances that fill .world's role there) is strongly in favor of stricter instance-level moderation compared to the more "individualistic" view a lot of the Reddit migratees tend to have. If we want people from the microblog fedi to participate we (collectively) need to up our moderation game. (And in my personal opinion instances like .world have grown too large to accomodate any reasonable expectation of moderation, except for select individual communities set up there)
The standard web UI also needs major improvements. Nobody logs in through an app for their first time and first impressions are critical. It needs to be easier to navigate and use without downloading an app so people will stick around long enough to get involved and have a good time.
I actually think the web ui is fine but we all have our own blindspots. How do you feel about Alexandrite and Photon? I had good initial impressions of Alexandrite but some minor issues with Photon. Instances could just make those defaults.
Bizarrely it feels way more active, the people leaving were never going to contribute anyway and that's fine. It seems to be stabilizing at a good amount of content per day.
From the statistics that seems to make sense, only total/active users is seeing a drop everything else was still rising at the "normal" rate
Lemmy's new user retention rate is considerably better than Threads.
Well, in that case the bar is on the ground
That's a personal opinion, but I would also be happy to see some groups spread on different communities to decide together on one community and make it grow together.
Browsing /all and seeing still another book or gaming community first post always makes me question if that post would not be better used in an established community.
And I know this will happen naturally overtime, I guess sometimes I would just like things to happen a bit faster and on a organized way.
I personally don't mind having multiple communities on different servers because some of these servers go down... a lot.
Makes sense to have "backups" sort of littered throughout the Fediverse, imho. I like seeing what different groups have to say about the subjects, too. Like, a thread will be wildly different on lemmy.world and beehaw.org, because I'm fairly sure beehaw is still defederated with lemmy.world, meaning I'll see very different groups of people on each instance's community.
It would be nice if servers could be tuned to prioritize locally hosted communities over remote ones. There's a real opportunity for each community on the same topic to have distinct flavours and cultures, but so long as they all appear to be the same damn thing and appear with the same frequency in the content stream, it's never going to happen. It's not like people really look at the remote server domain.
It's really nice that the Local feed exists, but when people just bulk subscribe to 8 different communities with the same name, stick to their subscription list, and then treat them all as the same place, that just kills a lot of potential for heterogeneity.
That's what people are used to from Reddit. They're used to having one giant subreddit about one topic. That's why everyone's centralized themselves on lemmy.world or kbin.social. That's why one of the most requested features is the ability to make "multireddits" (or otherwise combining all different communities into one)
This is a culture problem to solve, technical solutions can only do so much to help.
"This is good for Bitcoin" vibes there.
Key difference is that Bitcoin people want/need their numbers to go up,up,up as a measure of success.
Here, we are hoping to cultivate a healthy community (at either/both the instance and fediverse level). From my experience on various subreddits, focusing on growth is not a good way to do this.
Communities are defined more by who is not allowed in than by who is in the community. Lemmy phase 2 kicked off back in June, and it still needs some time to find its footing at a sustainable rate of growth.
I said it somewhere yesterday, but community building is more about moderation and organic growth than it is getting everyone on board all at once. The threadiverse is fantastic but its also running on a pair of software with substantial bugs and basic features missing
Yeah. Since Reddit is back to normal, the majority of people who left it due to protest now returns.
It’s probably more likely that we’re losing more of the “Fediverse is just Reddit 2.0” kind of people - which is great because that’s 10k or w/e less Redditors that’ll go back on the platform they actually want to use.
Fediverse doesn’t have an ocean of communities and content (yet), but that’s fine with me since I’m more active here and trying to offer more insightful comments outside of the Reddit staple “this” kind of comments.
At the very least it's less engaging than reddit. Makes it easier to scroll less frequently and focus on other more important things.
Yeah, honestly outside of sports subreddits I have preferred the Lemmy experience to Reddit.
Shit, are they planning this?
I would actually stop using Reddit if they did this. New Reddit is intolerable.
Nothing is sure, but they were also not supposed to put the API to crazy prices
I'll be more interested in the user numbers when it's been a year.
Numbers will go up again once the reddit infinity client stops working.
Don't revanced apps with personal API keys solve that issue?
I'd argue that some people are not tech savvy enough to figure that out. Whereas Lemmy is actually less complicated.
Yeah asking people to sign up for developer accounts and manage their own API is a pretty big blocker.
I know a lot of people are probably scoffing at the above statement, because in reality it's quite easy, but I think people often forget how tech illiterate the average person is. Hell, the number one criticism of Mastadon, Lemmy, and other fediverse sites is that the sign up process is complicated, despite the fact that it involves exactly one additional step (pick an instance).
I think there are two types of users
In both case, they are not moving to Lemmy
I have 3 accounts, but now only use 1 actively.
Let the servers keep crashing, tell everyone to add new instances to help with performance, which puts 1500 rows into the database tables that used to have 50 rows and invokes a massive federation 1-vote-1-https overhead... causing more crashing... all the while ignoring the SQL design of machine-generated ORM statements and counting logic hidden in the background triggers.
... keep users off your sever as a method of scaling by crashing. It's one of the more interesting experiences I've had this year! And I spent all of February and March with the release of GPT-4... which was also interesting!
How is it going on that side, are they still ignoring your pull requests?
I've largely given up on pull requests.... for sake of sanity. But I waded back in...
I made a pull request today... and I very strategically choose to do it with minimal of features so that it would just go through... and I got lectured that JOIN is never a concern and that filtering based on the core function of the site (presenting fresh meat to readers) was a bad use of the database. I've never seen hazing on a project like this. Memcached and Redis should be discussed every day as "why are we not doing what every website does?", but mum is the word.
This is unfortunate to hear. Have you considered creating a proof-of-concept fork with synthetic data that demonstrates how much more performant a cached, filtered approach would be? I think a magnitude or two improvement of some key metrics with heavy simulated load would be quite convincing.
Of course, that would be an insane amount of work, especially if it would get ignored, but something to consider!
I already did an insane amount of work to populate a Lemmy database with over 10 million posts. It is so incredibly slow out of the box that the normal API would take days to accomplish this. i had to rewrite the SQL TRIGGER logic to allow bulk inserts.
Here is my work on that:
With this in place, 300,000 posts a minute can be generated and reaching levels of 5 million or 10 million don't take too long.
That's really cool work! It's a bit beyond my pay grade, so I can't really comment too much about it.
I had a look at the PR you mentioned, and again, while I can't comment on the contents because I am a little out of my depth, may I voice my opinion on the exchange? This is coming from a place of trying to help, since I really do appreciate all the work you've put in and are putting in, and the fediverse can really use your talents, so I hope I don't offend you.
From my reading, it didn't appear that you were being ignored/hazed, and it seemed like the devs would have been open to your improvements. From working and leading big teams, I've noticed that communication and managing emotions is often much harder than writing code. In the thread, it appeared that communication had broken down on both sides (and seemed to have been the case in prior interactions too). Since you mentioned your struggles with autism in the thread, I wonder if that played a part in the tone of the devs perhaps being misinterpreted ? This is, of course only my interpretation, and I could be completely wrong.
Ultimately Lemmy itself is an example of trying to build a community and consensus amongst a broad and diverse group of people, who will often not see eye to eye.
In any case I would like to say I personally appreciate your hard work and really do hope you're able to help make Lemmy better. Thank you!
That's quite concerning. Would you have a link to that PR? Curious to see the exchange
I already feel like I have to keep sticking my neck out to get them to question if using the ORM and a dozen JOIN statements isn't a problem.... but I guess I'll link it: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3900
As stated on my Lemmy user profile, I'm "RocketDerp" on GitHiub.
Honestly, the reason I keep making noise is because I'm sick of Lemmy crashing all the time when I come to use it... and I am on many servers that this happens. I really am not trying to piss off the developers, I even said I felt like I am being hazed, and I feel like hazing in general might explain what is going on with how much they are avoiding the elephant in the ROOM that ORM and a dozen JOIN might be the cause! Let alone the lack of Redis or Memcached addition being avoided, that's a second elephant on the second floor tap-dancing.... GitHub Issue 2910 was the straw that broke my back weeks ago, it took months for them to address it when it could be fixed in a couple hours (and it was weeks before the Reddti API deadline at the end of June.... and issue 2910 was neglected). The whole thing was a nightmare for me to watch...
Dude, chill. Even if you're right, having a meltdown on github doesn't help anybody. Go outside and take a breath.
your comments there are exceptionally aggressive. you accuse the developers of “hazing” you when they disagree with a technical decision you’ve made, and then insult them, posting wild rants. i’ve seen you do this many times. you need to step back, relax, and not take technical feedback so personally
To be fair, I think he has a point.
The way to convey it is very much debatable, but the poor database performance of Lemmy seems to be what puts LemmyWorld down so often.
As LW is the biggest instance so far, it's a bit concerning for the potential scaling of instances
agreed. but lashing out at developers who are just trying to find out why the db performance is subpar with accusations of “hazing” is incredibly aggravating and antithetical to the entire concept of FOSS. there is a reason why almost every open source organization uses codes of conduct
As I said, very debatable 😄
Thanks for sharing!
This sounds like it would be interesting if I could understand it lol
It’s not
commenting to show I'm still active lmao
When they remove old.reddit it's over for me - there is no browser I've tried that new.reddit hasn't managed to crash within a few minutes of using it.
But I'll stay on old.reddit for as long as possible... there are just too many nazis and fascists waiting in the wings to hijack the communities I've put a lot effort into. It's better to just milk them for as long as possible.
::: spoiler Giant Hexbear Emoji.
:::
Keep fighting the good fight, comrade.
A fascist posted today—did YOU?
Are they getting rid of old.reddit???
That's the only thing that makes the site readable. Damn.
"e.g." is short for "exempli gratia", which is latin for "for example".
It hasn't been announced that they're getting rid of it, but it's a good example of what Reddit could do to fuck up.
I never actually looked this up before. I think in my head I've been reading it as being short for "eggsample" this whole time
I thought "example given"
They haven't said they will, but they might some day.
I can tell you the drop in active Lemmy users was NOT from hexbear and lemmy.grad. Those trolls are worse than the_donald was on the other platform.
Active users=bad trolls
They are indeed very much active
jealous of our posting power?
Quick! Everyone go open 2 more accounts! We can fix this!
Tankies and American democrats are scaring away the hoes. Source: I'm a hoe that has barely been coming here lately. There's not enough people here for niche communities to thrive, and the front page has been getting worse and worse. Today I saw this post on the front page, pretty close to the top.
https://lemmy.ca/post/3725038
I'd like to be clear that I don't care who americans voted for 7 years ago, but that's not why I don't think I should be seeing this. It's just, sheesh man. THIS is what the community wants and thinks is important in 2023? I'm trying to find a niche amongst THIS?
It's very similar to my problem with Gemini and every other "alt tech" platform I've tried to join. Worst case scenario it becomes a sewer for everyone who got banned from other sites for political extremism. Best case scenario, you end up with nothing but the demographic of upper class americans who do nothing but sit on their computers all day, which is not my scene either.
I'm starting to wonder if I should just leave the internet altogether.
Yeah the amount of American bullshit that infests all social media is fucking cancerous.
Sorry you had a bad experience.
I am myself trying to get out of the tech/politics/memes bubble with communities like !chat@beehaw.org , !casualconversation@lemmy.world , !moviesandtv@lemmy.film , !personalfinance@lemmy.ml , etc.
I'm afraid at some point a lot of people like you will just leave and we'll be left with Linux memes (and I use that OS)
Thanks for the community recommendations, they seem like great points to explore from. I also love Linux and tech in general, otherwise I probably wouldn't be here. But I have other interests too. That's something I find to be decent about tildes surprisingly, considering you need to be a massive tech nerd just to access one.
You are welcome!
There is also !trendingcommunities@feddit.nl that has a daily report of rising communities
Regardless of platform, if you don't want to see politics then block the political communities from your feed. The article itself is pretty factual and I don't see why any real conservative would support the clown show that is the GOP right now.
I've been getting around this by being really free with the community block button. But I've also had decent luck finding alts of the communities I used to use on reddit
The biggest problem here for now it's the fediverse search engine. It's hard to find c/ but I think this is a matter of time
LW communities being excluded from Lemmyverse since 3 weeks due to some API issue does not help indeed: https://github.com/tgxn/lemmy-explorer/issues/139
Good. I hope all the r/all reddit drones leave and maybe we can have actual discussions.
We're all on kbin, aren't we ? :)
I was, till lemmy got some decent mobile apps
I believe the lack of apps (that offer 100% of what Lemmy on browser has) is also playing its part. Many people will return or be more tempted to come here when apps will come out. Some are ready with a million more well on the way.
No. Nobody likes apps. People prefer their browser. This app thing corporate bullshit.
based take. and to this i would add: if it's not on the open web, it's not to be used.
"Nobody likes app" Hm.
Honestly, I didn't really start using Lemmy until Sync for Lemmy was out. I know it's a closed source app which gets a lot of hate around here but it is already very full featured and a great browsing experience. The developer listens to user feedback and is invested in making the app the best he can.
Do these numbers include kbin?
I'm loving it here but yeah hope there's a bit more engagement. I think the main thing people need to focus on is building up the more common communities. From there we can slowly branch out as more people join. If we spread out too thin we're just going to get graveyard communities.
As we grow we can focus on expanding and getting more of those niche communities going .
I host my own lemmy instance. Is there a way to get comments from other instances to show up?
I was able to subscribe to lemmy.world communities, but when articles show up it only shows comments from my instance (none)
https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs