Ya know. The fact that active users was going down made me feel like part of the 1% of stubborn assholes but ever since RiF went dark the only time I've been on reddit is when a Google search took me there because fuck spez. I'm in it for the long haul. I won't be going back. And ya know what? Fuck Google too. I've migrated to Firefox and DuckDuckGo since then too. Idk maybe it's just cause I am stubborn but I refuse to be a hypocrite.
I've done the same. Even installed linux on my gaming rig. Also moved everything to proton.
Proton boyz
Agreed. I may be principled to a fault, but I'll never go back to Reddit. It has that corporate miasma to it now.
Truth be told, it had the miasma long before the API changes, but that was the point where the boiled frog croaked for me.
What is a reddit?
An old corporate link aggregator. Think Facebook meets Lemmy.
Lemmy is quite the pipeline
All our data are belong to us.
I joined !privacy@lemmy.ml and now I use GrapheneOS (instead of Android), Fedora (instead of Windows), Firefox (instead of chrome), Mullvad VPN, jmp.chat (instead of google voice), and Kagi (instead of google search).
It's a rabbit hole.
Although Fedora was mostly because an update to windows 11 completely broke it and I didn't feel like trying to fix windows so I just wiped my laptop and installed Fedora.
I've installed Libreddit to redirect any Google searches that lead me to Reddit. They're not getting my visit!
I hope you're donating to the respective libreddit instance hoster, because unlike Reddit, they're not a multibillion corporation with a steady ad income to pay for their traffic
If you're not, then I suggest you use old.reddit.com with uBlock Origin
Keep up the momentum! Install Signal, migrate to the Proton suite.
fellow Thumb-key user?
Tell me more. Like a yubi key? I haven't progressed that far yet.
it's an android keyboard that specializes in thumb movements, and in principle anables one to type fast using a single hand. That being said it is devilishly difficult at first and it has no autotorrect or suggestioins as of yet, causing small misspellings here and there
Search for com.dessalines.thumbkey in F-Droid
Hello fellow stubborner!
Just gave my windows PC to upgrade my kids gaming setup, Linux on a ThinkPad T490 for me now.
It's such a fresh feeling, no more crap everywhere.
I assumed active users was going down partly because some of us created multiple accounts on different instances in the beginning to get a feel for it all, then ended up just using one
i hardly use lemmy compared to rif but i was under the belief reddit content is just better but the app sucks. i was wrong turns out it all sucks. rif just gave the shit a tuxedo.
nowadays i look at reddit and the content is asisine its all the same shitty headlines and weird ask questions "how much sex does the average woodchuck have during football season?"
it feels like Facebook. lifeless and like everyone is pretending
Rip rif
Your comment warms my heart and gives me hope. Thank you
Really has felt like the thrediverse has been quite active lately. During the exodus we had a lot of posting about... the exodus. But now we have a lot of posting about actual topics and what feels like a pretty healthy community building save for a few instances that will probably get defederated before too long.
Same I find the engagement is raising. The threads here are more sincere. Sure it's not as active when it comes to some things but that's fine IMHO. Building an online community right takes time.
I also feel that people here are much nicer, and willing to engage with content. Even tiny communities usually make pretty great posts.
I greatly appreciate the lack of reddit meta getting repeated adnauseum. 69 and 420 references really stop being funny when repeated in so many threads.
I totally agree!
Don't you mean "this!"?
Lol, exactly.
Yes, absolutely.
And you know what?
I love it, just the feeling of actually engaging of people. Something I didn't have on Reddit. I think it really opens my eyes on how much our attention gets commercialised.
I'm so happy there's no more posts about people trying to fix federation
I mean it's fine, improving federation is always welcome, it's just dull when you go to the fediverse and all they talk about is... the fediverse
Oh sorry, I wasn't clear enough. I'm taking about the posts that have an authoritarian slant to them.
"There should only be one (memes or whatever) community across the fediverse. Someone... should deal with all these copies."
Fedi doesn't map exactly into their single server reddit experience. They want to re-create king spaz for some reason. It was kinda gross and I felt a few randos really showed their ass.
Blimey there's a name from the past. I remember painting a Citadel Miniature (white metal job) of a demon of Slaanesh. That would have been around 1986-7ish. Four armed thing and looked bloody nasty! That was before Warty-Forty really took off.
I moulded a little skull out of Milliput, with a tiny snake running in through the base and out of an eye socket. I separated a foot from the base and lifted it up a bit and stuck the skull under it. White metal is quite soft but you have to be careful. I spent quite a while modelling "grass" and such. The grass went from a dead looking green/brown around the demon to normal in a sort of circle of ruin.
Nowadays my eyesight can barely see a 00 brushes' bristles, let alone let me use one.
Geordi only has the visor in Generations, pretty sure this is a TNG episode
The comment you’re replying to is replying to a comment with Picard doing a little dance. Thats from Insurrection.
Your mention of Geordi makes me think you’re looking at the comment with Geordi sitting as Riker does his maneuver, which is out of the comment chain.
You’re right, MrGG asked if it was Insurrection and I based my reply off the other gif right below it, wouldn’t have noticed if you hadn’t pointed it out. Live long and prosper
I feel like this was after one of those training simulator episodes where they go to different points in time but I'm probably wrong
that guy is a legend and also confuses me every time I see him outside of a star trek community
Him and Stamets
I swear I see your username everywhere
It's probably because I've commented a couple of times. Usually I have nothing to say, but I've felt rather engaged lately.
OMG, LilDumpy left another comment! 📸
Please, please. I'm just a guy. Be sure to follow to catch a low level comment or two every few days!
Hiring: Low level guys.
Opportunities: Adventurer interactions. Loot. Rumours before the bigger places hear about them.
-- Dungeon management
Same. Never commented on Reddit but here there are fewer comments so I feel like I can contribute
Commenting there seems to be like yelling into a giant void with everyone on the planet, here it feels like screaming into a smaller void with few other people who seem to be super cool.
TL;DR:
By default, Lemmy only counts posts and comments for active users. These instances also started counting the votes. According to Lemmy NSFW admin, there are 3 times more active users with lurkers.
Given all the different ways “active” is defined we may as well just collect all the meanings available.
Mastodon and Twitter etc, for example, count logging on as active.
While I can see the argument for voting, it is qualitatively different from posting/commenting. Knowing both, as well as log in numbers too might make sense. But muddying the waters is probably confusing … though it is interesting that any instance can define what it means by “active”.
I would say that voting isn't actually different from posting/commenting. It's a process whereby a user takes part in a discussion/topic/post. In an ideal world, everyone would post, but we shouldn't act like active people who don't feel like they have anything to say explicitly, aren't here.
Totally agree. Even when two commenters are replying to one another, there is always another layer where they are also addressing everyone in the thread/community/instance/fediverse, which obviously includes lurkers.
The votes shape everything about the platform, so ignoring the lurkers in the stats feels like it's missing an important data point.
Ah, that could be it.
I would like other instances to do the same, to me ama voting lurker is an active user
Absolutely. Other social media platforms count as active when we mistakenly enter their sites :)
Okay, that makes more sense, I was trying to figure out what had changed in the past week. I'm very curious to see how that data would look for other servers too. I think it's more logical to count users even if they don't post or comment, because they are still a critical part of the whole ecosystem if they browse and vote regularly. Even without saying anything, their thoughts and opinions help shape the content and discourse through voting.
And for that matter, weekly active users and daily active users would be two other interesting datapoints. You can see the daily and weekly users on the sidebar of instances, but I don't know of any tool/site that scrapes all of that info and displays it in an easily digestible format.
According to Lemmy NSFW admin, there are 3 times more active users with jerkers.
FTFY
if you switch to daily stats you can see a big bump on the 4th, and a smaller bump on the 5th, is that when they made this change?
I think if you exclude those 2 days we're still on a very very slight downward trend, but once every instance adopts the new method it'll be interesting to see what the trend is after that, it could be that users get tired or posting/commenting and fallback to being lurkers
If you look closely, the downward trend actually stopped before the change in stats. We dipped below 33,000 in mid-November, but then started hovering above 33,000 for multiple weeks until the bump.
I came to Lemmy after Reddit's crackdown on third-party clients. Looking back, I'm pretty happy with how Lemmy is going and how it feels right now. The number of users decreased after the initial spike, sure, but it also stabilized at a respectable level. There are things I'm still missing, but the way it is definitely works for me.
Same situation for me. This is such a nice place compared to reddit. I still think it would be better if it grows some more, but one of the nice things about Lemmy is that it has a more "niche" user base
Yeah, same here. I'm not nearly as active here as I was on reddit, but there's not as much going on here and activity feeds itself. It's fine, I read more books.
For me, it's the opposite. Only ever lurked on Reddit, but started posting and commenting more here. Feels more inviting.
Same here
I’m trying to use lemmy more
I’m posting more on lemmy now
I'm in danger
I bent my wookie.😥
I prefer quality over quantity, but more quality is always welcome. I'm not going back to reddit. The reddit alien is about to become the Borg of the shareholders.
Same here unironically
It’s good to see more people moving to lemmy
Honestly, it’s not surprising. They seem very ban-happy there lately, with accounts getting banned over nothing. And I’ve seen a fair few subs getting the axe as well. When a site gets actively hostile to users and lets mods run their own little dictatorships, people eventually get fed up with it.
Lemmy isn’t Reddit, but at least it’s… also not Reddit :D
I wonder how much of that has to do with fighting between moderators and subs being forcefully reopened
A large number of subs were forceful reopened, and the mods replaced with trash people who just wanted to have mod powers. The purge of people who gave a fuck, is done. I'm starting to see posts and news show up here on Lemmy before reddit. Which kinda makes sense, all the most active posters were forced out or quit and moved here.
This place shall not die. Keep the party going guys.
Same here
I’m trying to use lemmy more and post more content
Related to the recent reddit mobile site update that straight up breaks the website perhaps? (Cant scroll, can’t interact)
Don't these people test their shit before release? Hobby devs have better qc than reddit
I thought that may have been intentional anti-adblock (just speculating).
Was my first thought. /r/friends doesn't work on the mobile site now and that's the only thing I ever go to back to Reddit for anymore. That's one content stream I can't duplicate anywhere else.
I used to look to Reddit when big news broke because it was always on the front page within minutes. This past year there have been a few times that big news stories weren't even on the top few pages. I gave Lemmy a try, and it feels just like reddit from 2013. I love it. I'm home.
I still go to Reddit for American politics, my cities sub, and /r/nfl.
But I haven't made a single comment and treat it more as a news aggregator than a proper community. And even that is happening less and less as I get more comfortable with the pacing of the community here.
On Reddit you can make a clever comment at the right time and get thousands of upvotes and sidebar conversations. It's great for a shot of that sweet, sweet dopamine.
On Lemmy, I rarely get more than 5-10 upvotes, but the conversations are meaningful and nuanced.
People are realizing that Lemmy is not a 1:1 drop-in replacement and are adjusting their expectations and behavior accordingly. Hopefully we'll hit a critical mass soon.
I never experienced reddit 2013 but reddit's front page is gone. They've swapped out r/all for r/popular on new reddit, videos and screenshots are everywhere instead of links and they've even renamed themselves to "the heart of the internet"
Upwards and onwards!
We must move forward, not backward, upward, not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!
Hexbear be like 🥱
i have been posting for 3 years!
🥱
Yeah shit, it was when redditors found you freaks that most of them left
Good. Lemmy, like Reddit, is fundamentally user driven platform. The most important thing for the life of it is people making posts.
True, too bad reddit is a bot driven platform now.
Bots are posting shit on Lemmy too you know.
Reddit is so censored it's pointless. Almost all the comments seem like they're written by bots or gov guys with square haircuts who think this is what "those nerds" talk like
IMO reddit has loads of bullshit bots and boosting but sadly it has some good targeted communities too.
or gov guys with square haircuts who think this is what “those nerds” talk like
why is this making me laugh so much xD
Most posts are essentially ads in disguise. Bots are the ones running the show here too though.
Bots are the ones running the show here too though.
Is this about hexbear and lemmygrad? These accusations have never made sense to me. They have been here long before it became popular and they had the same opinions back then. It makes no sense and is a waste of resources to have bunch of bots posting stuff when there is no one to read those posts.
I think the number of servers is a interesting metric to look on, it correlates with users who are tech savy and are early adopters, before the exodus the number of servers was growing consistently , despite the number of users mostly staying the same, That was IMO an indication of the relative quality of lemmy at the time and indeed it seemed to got the most benefits from the exodus out of all the reddit alternatives.
compare that with peertube which shows consistent growth in the number of servers (see this month, and long term), I think what makes them better then lemmy currently is that they currently seem better at prioritizing feature development by using a dedicated site.
Also the total donations have declined in the last month (from €3962 to €3,771 today), So i think we should try to not get overconfident and work to secure the future of lemmy or some other open source reddit alternative.
unfortunately other data is not encouraging , the number of servers is both down since the exodus and in the recent month.
this is normal. we'll go through a lot of similar waves. people start servers, realize they're a lot of work, and then abandon them. servers that foster a healthy community will survive. hexbear's worst cycle involved losing the entire administrative team just weeks after a large percentage of the website left. don't sweat the growing pains - work together to learn, grow, and change.
Before the Reddit exodus, I don't remember many active servers besides Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad (there was Lemm.ee and Lemmy.ca but they both had like 3 posts a week). Hexbear wasn't federated, and servers were mostly being desperately spun up in anticipation for a flood of users who would crash the network.
The donations being down is bad though. I would love for at least Lemmy.ml to sticky a post asking for funding; one has to look no further than Thunderbird to see how well that works.
Before the Reddit exodus, I don’t remember many active servers besides Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad (there was Lemm.ee and Lemmy.ca but they both had like 3 posts a week). Hexbear wasn’t federated, and servers were mostly being desperately spun up in anticipation for a flood of users who would crash the network.
There were about 80 before the exodus (may 2023), compared to to 40 (may 2022) and 15 (may 2021), about double the servers every year which is good considering this is "word to mouth" growth, even older data shows a clear growth trend, my guess is that i and others didn't really see them because they are some dude community, even today i think i will have a problem listing more then 5-10 lemmy servers.
beehaw and the science instance were also fairly active before the exodus, and midwest.social was like, a little active
I would use Lemmy more if people on here weren’t so toxic. It’s been bringing out the toxicity in me more than I’m comfortable with. Too many confidently incorrect people speaking on topics they have absolutely no experience in, complex discussion completely boiled down to platitudes without any nuance, and tribalism that rivals what’s on Twitter.
Mac and Windows users are immediately downvoted for not sucking down Linux’s balls in every scenario, a complete cesspool of discussion with regard to Israel and Palestine appears all over the most popular posts, straw men and bad faith discussion appears in every community (with rare exception), and deification of the popular faces in the orbit of any topic without any room for critical thought around their positions is the norm. Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria.
I was excited for the fediverse after watching the slow decline of Digg, /., Reddit, etc. but it’s obvious that the worst parts of those platforms are creeping up here too and there’s nothing to be done except wade through the sewage to get to things that are interesting and insightful. It’s a shame but Lemmy will never be as popular as the alternatives were. Techie incels rooted in here too early.
Edit: I’m now banned from /c/technology (or at least shadowbanned on one instance) for not accepting their arguments on piracy. This is what I mean. There’s no nuance here.
I'm gonna tell you something.
While reading your comment i became more and more convinced it would end with and don't let this man distract you from the fact that in 1998, the Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table.
Except then you didn't.
Which was a bummer.
You know… I’m gonna tell you something too.
I usually debate throwing that in there and then I realize that, outside of Reddit, that thing doesn’t really work anymore. It’s not an original idea. It doesn’t add anything to the discussion. Outside of being a meme and an occasional source of a good chuckle, Lemmy is too young for something like that. There’s not enough good content here to justify repeated jokes and junk like “Oh no! He broke both his arms! Where’s mom?”
If that means that this is a bummer for you, then I think you need to reevaluate what you’re trying to get from Lemmy. It reminds me of the time when 2 years before the new millennium, the Undertaker threw his adversary, Mick, off of the cage in a match called Hell in a Cell and plummeted 16 feet through the table of the announcers giving commentary on the match. Although it may have been entertaining the first time it happened, it probably wasn’t as funny to the person that was dropped and probably why he never attempted it again.
All that’s to say, be careful what you wish for.
We need to change the way we interact with social media.
My advice, points don't matter and you don't deserve anyone a debate.
Drop the phone or press back and go next if it feels toxic.
Internet should serve you and not the other way around.
If you have something to share, make your essay in a different post with the appropriate documentation and let it sit for someone else to find.
Block toxic people and tell them why you blocked them.
tell them why you blocked them.
Meh. Life's too short. Probably better to just block and move on.
Works too.
Agreed 100%. I don’t use social media at all with Lemmy being the only exception and, as I stated in my original post, I’m not really having a good time here so I’m spending less and less of it on the platform. It’s incredibly unwelcoming here.
I can relate to your frustration about jerks and toxicity but I dont share the severity of it. At least I would not say it that way.
Yes, lemmy can get pretty bad (looking at you c/firefox) but that’s normal with niche stuff.
I moderate a smallish subreddit (2k peeps) and get regular questions if I can please ban the noobs that ask noob questions. I politely decline.
This place here is in its literal infancy and saying „its so sad that it will never…“ helps nobody.
Just report assholes, check if you made mistakes and if nothing else helps, make a new community based on that change. That is how we improve. Moaning and spelling doom is a bad strategy in every part of life.
How is /c/firefox a niche community? You’re just reinforcing what I’m saying. The biggest communities here are filled with the worst kinds of people. The ones that should be the most welcoming to entice new users and more discussion are the ones that are the least welcoming.
I do report assholes and I have made some communities but no one joins them when their first attempt at joining Lemmy is being downvoted repeatedly for saying “Windows 11 isn’t as bad as I thought it would be” in the tech communities and then never commenting again.
I’m not moaning and spelling doom. I’m pointing out that if Lemmy ever expects to grow to the point where it’s a realistic alternative to sites like Reddit, then the moderation and, by extension, the users need to lighten up and be open to discussion that may not agree with them.
As was to be expected, you got me wrong. I don’t know if intentional or not but let me explain:
c/firefox isn’t niche, lemmy and the fediverse are.
The biggest communities always have the largest variety of people and will have a lot of demand in moderating, not lemmy‘s strong suit as we‘re still debating if „moderation bad“ or we‘d like to silence bullies.
I‘d also like to see your scientific study that proves the communities that should be most welcoming are the least. This kind of black/white claim isn’t helpful for debate.
Windows 11 be what it may. You shouldn’t be downvoted for using it, correct. I have been downvoted like hell for other inconspicuous things. Thats unfortunate and something you can change by talking about it with people. Make posts, engage, but maybe try to stay on the „i want this to succeed“ instead of „this is going to fail“ side.
The fediverse in general is still finding its identity. You can be part of that if you decide to have meaningful debate.
Btw. opening communities and have nobody join is not a lemmy thing. That happens on reddit as well. It’s only a question if you can hit the right nerve. I‘m neurologically incapable of doing so since I‘m very different from others but some do. Maybe try helping out in other communities and help out that way.
Have a good one.
On the other hand, since Lemmy is made up of a much smaller userbase, I've had a lot of success with just blocking users. When it's one user with 100 comments, it's a lot easier to solve the issue with the tools available to you as a user than on Reddit where you're more likely to have 100 different people making 1-3 comments each spouting blind rhetoric/useless exaggeration/unfunny meme responses. It's not big enough for people to bother too much with alt accounts or brigading yet either.
I do my best to stay away from posts with topics likely to attract that sort of crowd too.
In general while it's not as good as I hoped for, I find Lemmy/fediverse a hell of a lot better than what I left. People are going to be assholes wherever they think they can get away with it, and the best response is to starve them of attention.
Fair enough. I find that with the federation, blocking people just results in my feed being emptier than I’d like to be. It’s already pretty sparse. Removing even more of it just because someone was an idiot in a singular, particular topic seems like overkill for such a small space. We’re just barely getting over the hump where new content is showing regularly enough to where the front pages aren’t filled with the same posts for days. And, even then, it’s not great content.
Have you considered blocking people you don't want to interact with?
Yes. Not only have I considered it. I’ve done it. The issue is that the Lemmy communities aren’t that big, even when you’re not referring to smaller instances and just sticking to federated communities, so blocking people just for dumb comments means you’re removing more and more of an already small user base.
It’s a solution to be sure. It’s just not one that I’d care to use right now when me blocking someone doesn’t actually help what I’m perceiving as the issue that is keeping Lemmy from growing.
I use Boost because it has a tagging feature. So instead of blocking people with smoking hot trash takes I tag them so I can read their posts and comments with scepticism in the future.
I only block people who troll and do nothing else.
It's really helpful for not shrinking the pool of comments or posts I can read.
I may need to try another app, then. That sounds useful.
Yeah, I feel like with Reddit I had the opposite problem.
There are so many low-effort, memey comments that blocking each user who engaged in it would cause me to block half the site!
That's the point, though. You're being hyperbolic to suggest that you could even attempt to block half of Reddit. On Lemmy, you could probably actually do that, depending on the instance.
My point is that there's no point in blocking each annoying account on reddit because there are so many.
Yes, I got that. Hence my reply. But they also make up less total numbers than the rest of the user base. That’s not the case here because the user base is so small.
Mmm, relatively speaking, most reddit posts (>50%) have become low-effort/pandering garbage that isn't worth reading.
You act like that’s a new thing.
Also, case in point: Both our posts have gotten downvoted already. How is that even possible for such benign replies?
I thought we were talking about blocking users, not downvoting them.
The thread we’re in, that I started, was about how unwelcoming Lemmy is for new and casual users. This entire interaction is just highlighting it.
I see your point.
A lot of "technical" users are on lemmy who can't tolerate dissenting opinions. Thankfully the mods seem to be doing a 'decent' job of keeping things in check on both sides.
Speaking of the Simpsons, do you think the people on alt.nerd.obsessive were better?
Who said anything about the Simpsons? 😘
I never went there, to be honest. All my newsgroups were programming/computer/game related or were piracy groups. I think, in general, newsgroups were better because there was a barrier of entry that was required to get there. Now that anyone can just download an app and spew whatever garbage they want in seconds, we have what we have.
Are you old enough to remember actual flame wars on Usenet, etc.? That's what I'm talking about. The people who invented the term "flame war" weren't deterred by a high barrier to entry.
I am old enough to remember that. It wasn’t a huge part of what Usenet was. I remember downloading the original DooM shareware and finding an entire community of people that were super helpful and showed me resources for how to make my own maps and levels. I learned all about programming, making websites, and video editing. Maybe I got in earlier than you did or something, I’m not sure. For the most part, it was a group of highly technical, highly educated people looking for other people with similar interests. It was great.
Only a matter of time before reddit fucks up again, so we better get the good places before the second wave of migration
They keep a/b testing and rolling out worse and worse mobile websites. They've gone and done it again. For any regular mobile website user that wasn't affected by the 3rd party app issue, or for anyone who switched from a 3rd party app to the website because it wasn't as bad as the 1st party app, well... Now it is. Now it's possibly worse.
So, we might hope for a prolonged period of organic growth now. Especially if Lemmy doesn't get flooded with meta discussions again.
I started using Lemmy since September 2022 I think, but I rarely open it, two weeks ago I was permabanned on reddit for report abuse, then semi-unbanned, so I deleted my account, and now I'm starting to use Lemmy actively, there are a lot more servers and users now and I found a new nice server.
I'm wondering if it'll be similar to people switching from (convenient & centralized) Compuserve and AOL to (difficult but p2p) email and web. That took years.
Slow and steady wins the race.
Prodigy! Don’t forget Prodigy! :)
I'm glad to see this. I was mostly a lurker at the old place for over 10 years.
Creating posts and commenting at times was difficult and often they were deleted due to some rule or issue. The worst was when users would message to let me know the post had been deleted and they knew due to some other form of the site they were using.
In all my years of managing Forums before this period it wasn't that hard to create new topics and participate so I gave up.
I started lurking here at Lemmy then starting seeing this theme about user engagement going down and not enough content. When I would end up back at the old place after a Google search on something I could see the volume number differences between lemmy and there so I decided to try posting again.
So far it's been a lot easier especially in sh1tposting. I did run into a couple of hiccups but overall it's been a lot easier.
I'll enjoy it while it lasts as over time with more users things will change, at least for now the posts are not drowning in comments by the thousands yet. I can keep up with that. It kind of reminds me of my old forum days in the early 2000s.
Had to use the reddit app the other day.. That people can stand to be on there still is beyond me. I like it here on the fediverse and im not going back
You can still use old.reddit.com on your preferred browser without the app just fyi
I go back every now and then. Immediately reminded of why I left.
I’ve noticed that there seems to be a lot of activity, enough to replace Reddit, on the most popular communities and instances. Even my more niche communities such as !fantasyfootball@lemmy.world has had more activity lately. Although the niche ones have a way to go to be replacements for their counterparts on Reddit
Good, we need an alternative to Reddit that isn't manipulated
Give it time and there will be bad actors trying to manipulate Lemmy.
It does kind of have a problem with mod abuse but that's on a per-community or instance basis, so it's nowhere near as bad.
How do they handle bots? Seems to me this statistic could be heavily inflated. Or do they account for that?
Here is their listing of users per instance, looks a bit sus to me ("Benutzer" means "Users"):
It's active users, not total users. I'm not sure on the exact metric, but users need to post, comment, vote or whatever to be counted for this statistic.
Bots on alien.top do that afaik. They impersonate real Reddit users after all.
I don't think I understand your point about them impersonating users? It seems to me like an account gets created for everyone using the portal. It then provides you a password and you can start using that account. I tried it just now and it seems like your account gets flagged as bot on creation automatically. So most people posting from that domain, might just not have unchecked that "I'm a bot"-tick and are actual former Reddit users.
Creating an account doesn't make a user active though, but for the question if a bot posting stuff counts as an active user or not, I honestly can't say.
Afaik the bot auto-creation is disabled now, but it used to mirror some Reddit subreddits by automatically creating bot accounts for every Reddit user posting in them, and using that to post the same content in a Lemmy community. That's how the instance got over a million users, pretty much all of them are bots that do whatever the Reddit user with the same name is doing in one of the mirrored subreddits.
What you are describing is another part of the plan: Allowing the original Reddit users to take over their mirror accounts on Lemmy. Apparently it just creates accounts for them if no bot exists yet.
I don't think voting does count as an activity for this metric.
That's good. A lot of communities have been slowly dying 🫤 I've been using Mastodon more and more but it's not the same.
It's winter break for me so that's why I'm going to use it a bit more.
I think Thanksgiving holidays in the US and a long weekend might make the difference for a lot of people too.
You know what's actually cool?
While many suppose that majority just moved back, they didn't! Less than half of users actually left Lemmy after an exodus, and now about what, 95% of users?..are actually from there.
Worrying that this is the CHUD invasion from parler or one of those pretend places to data mine hate and sell powdered eggs, lead pills and gold to mostly helpless idiots. Some comment sections have gotten noticeable shittier and less civil lately. We don't need growth for the sake of it.
I'm a boomerang. Reddit has the content, but it's largely focused on the larger subs which are the ones I want to avoid. I'll have to decide whether or not I want to run into obvious tankies (mayo) or try to spot misinformation campaigns (reddit).
And reddit is getting worse in every way. Reddit wants to turn into an ad platform and that's the way things are going. Lot's more locked comments and posts, totally unchecked misinformation and dooming.
On iOS through firefox the google login prompt can't be closed. This is what prompted me back, I started using Voyager again.
I might come back and search for another home server, create a new account and delete my old one. Start fresh.
I can't stand reddit's god-awful user interface.
Both old and new reddit suck balls. I can't believe someone got paid for that.
I didn't mind old Reddit but the new UI just feels too busy and annoying
One issue with Reddit was the extreme even obsesive moderation level. It was totally frustrating to post stuff in some subs, lot of new people just avoid it even experienced users like me.
On the other hand… there’s a lot of Lemmy threads with flame wars that should really be pruned from the post by mods. The flame wars bring a lot of negativity and noise that takes away from the actual discussion
Yes in most circumstances. It's valuable to let people speak, but not for like 5 comments back and forth.
Lemmy desperately needs a "take it to DMs" policy.
I respectfully disagree - it's very easy to contract comment threads you have no interest in (at least on my client if I long-press a comment, it hides the comment and all responses), but I sometimes enjoy reading through an actual discussion two or three people have in a comment chain. They may be few and far between, but that's the nature of an open forum.
Why not? After a point, the discussion gets buried under "click here for more."
Not once did I ever get a post in r/showerthoughts past the mods. I eventually stopped trying
I got a bunch of posts removed there too, but tbh I kinda get it. 99% have the same repetitive showerthoughts and the whole sub was by design, super low effort, meaning the garbage : quality content ratio was like 500:1 so they had to rely on brutish rules
dev'd an online course web app and website for a community college. users/activity was very cyclic. could see the hits going up every Sunday night as students tried to catch up before Monday class. usage normally dropped around weekends/holidays. maybe similar surges depending on time of day.
analytics and local logs. apache stats. been years since I cared
I was having difficulty with servers being down and nothing loading when I first deleted Reddit. Things finally seem stable so I've been a lot more active.
The apps weren't available either.
The Lemming went unto spez and said, "let my people go!"
Recently it seems like the Fediverse is a lot more quiet than before. Even in the tech and privacy communities I follow things have been rather slow lately.
Tbf, even they need a break sometimes.
I like lemmy but it's always about capitalism, linux and privacy. Even when it isn't the comments make it about any of those 3.
You've proven your own point excellently well
You arent wrong.
Lemmy is not welcoming to regular people who want to talk about normie shit.
Has to be all the yiff here.
I just wish more people were talking about Warhammer and Battletech here.
I was just wondering if this month would be the one where we see another upward trend. Glad that seems to be the case!
oh lawd they comin
LET'S GOOOOOOOOOOOO
I'm so glad I moved here
we found the first resonance to the step response
Activity
That’s great news.
I get logged out every time I change VPN location, and sometimes I'm too lazy to log back in. Does being logged out count as inactive?
I think you have to post or comment, but it's over the whole month
What I noticed is the server I used to login to disappeared all of a sudden so I guess all the users who were on that server couldn't login and leaving. Same is happening across fediverse.
Was it FMHY? Some instances that were created during the Reddit blackout went down to technical or logistical issues and decided to operate under other instances
Can confirm, I made an instance around the time that the blackout started - unfortunately the hardware it was running on was starting to experience some issues. It's still up and running, but for now I've made a fresh new instance on way better hardware - and this time without a subdomain 😅
I've seen this graph before. What is "Active Users Halfyear" and how is it different from "Active Users Monthly", especially since they both change and are measured... monthly?
Probably "number of users who were active this month" for monthly, versus "number of users who were active the last half year (6 mo)" for halfyear. Both can be updated monthly. A user who was active 3 months ago would be in the second group but not the first.
Hm, that makes sense. Still a little ambiguous, I think.
i moved 13 hours again and well, this place is good, so why come back?
Ya know. The fact that active users was going down made me feel like part of the 1% of stubborn assholes but ever since RiF went dark the only time I've been on reddit is when a Google search took me there because fuck spez. I'm in it for the long haul. I won't be going back. And ya know what? Fuck Google too. I've migrated to Firefox and DuckDuckGo since then too. Idk maybe it's just cause I am stubborn but I refuse to be a hypocrite.
I've done the same. Even installed linux on my gaming rig. Also moved everything to proton.
Proton boyz
Agreed. I may be principled to a fault, but I'll never go back to Reddit. It has that corporate miasma to it now.
Truth be told, it had the miasma long before the API changes, but that was the point where the boiled frog croaked for me.
What is a reddit?
An old corporate link aggregator. Think Facebook meets Lemmy.
Lemmy is quite the pipeline
All our data are belong to us.
I joined !privacy@lemmy.ml and now I use GrapheneOS (instead of Android), Fedora (instead of Windows), Firefox (instead of chrome), Mullvad VPN, jmp.chat (instead of google voice), and Kagi (instead of google search).
It's a rabbit hole.
Although Fedora was mostly because an update to windows 11 completely broke it and I didn't feel like trying to fix windows so I just wiped my laptop and installed Fedora.
I've installed Libreddit to redirect any Google searches that lead me to Reddit. They're not getting my visit!
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libreddit/
I hope you're donating to the respective libreddit instance hoster, because unlike Reddit, they're not a multibillion corporation with a steady ad income to pay for their traffic
If you're not, then I suggest you use old.reddit.com with uBlock Origin
Nice extension, I installed too 👍
Thank you!
Keep up the momentum! Install Signal, migrate to the Proton suite.
fellow Thumb-key user?
Tell me more. Like a yubi key? I haven't progressed that far yet.
it's an android keyboard that specializes in thumb movements, and in principle anables one to type fast using a single hand. That being said it is devilishly difficult at first and it has no autotorrect or suggestioins as of yet, causing small misspellings here and there
Search for com.dessalines.thumbkey in F-Droid
Hello fellow stubborner!
Just gave my windows PC to upgrade my kids gaming setup, Linux on a ThinkPad T490 for me now.
It's such a fresh feeling, no more crap everywhere.
I assumed active users was going down partly because some of us created multiple accounts on different instances in the beginning to get a feel for it all, then ended up just using one
i hardly use lemmy compared to rif but i was under the belief reddit content is just better but the app sucks. i was wrong turns out it all sucks. rif just gave the shit a tuxedo.
nowadays i look at reddit and the content is asisine its all the same shitty headlines and weird ask questions "how much sex does the average woodchuck have during football season?"
it feels like Facebook. lifeless and like everyone is pretending
Rip rif
Your comment warms my heart and gives me hope. Thank you
Really has felt like the thrediverse has been quite active lately. During the exodus we had a lot of posting about... the exodus. But now we have a lot of posting about actual topics and what feels like a pretty healthy community building save for a few instances that will probably get defederated before too long.
Same I find the engagement is raising. The threads here are more sincere. Sure it's not as active when it comes to some things but that's fine IMHO. Building an online community right takes time.
I also feel that people here are much nicer, and willing to engage with content. Even tiny communities usually make pretty great posts.
I greatly appreciate the lack of reddit meta getting repeated adnauseum. 69 and 420 references really stop being funny when repeated in so many threads.
I totally agree!
Don't you mean "this!"?
Lol, exactly.
Yes, absolutely.
And you know what?
I love it, just the feeling of actually engaging of people. Something I didn't have on Reddit. I think it really opens my eyes on how much our attention gets commercialised.
I'm so happy there's no more posts about people trying to fix federation
I mean it's fine, improving federation is always welcome, it's just dull when you go to the fediverse and all they talk about is... the fediverse
Oh sorry, I wasn't clear enough. I'm taking about the posts that have an authoritarian slant to them.
"There should only be one (memes or whatever) community across the fediverse. Someone... should deal with all these copies."
Fedi doesn't map exactly into their single server reddit experience. They want to re-create king spaz for some reason. It was kinda gross and I felt a few randos really showed their ass.
What is "thredrsiverse"?
Here's a comment for even more activity!
Response. RESPONSE!!!
LOUD NOISES!
This silence offends Slaanesh! More! LOUDER!
Blimey there's a name from the past. I remember painting a Citadel Miniature (white metal job) of a demon of Slaanesh. That would have been around 1986-7ish. Four armed thing and looked bloody nasty! That was before Warty-Forty really took off.
I moulded a little skull out of Milliput, with a tiny snake running in through the base and out of an eye socket. I separated a foot from the base and lifted it up a bit and stuck the skull under it. White metal is quite soft but you have to be careful. I spent quite a while modelling "grass" and such. The grass went from a dead looking green/brown around the demon to normal in a sort of circle of ruin.
Nowadays my eyesight can barely see a 00 brushes' bristles, let alone let me use one.
Had to comment too, we all have to do our part
A very late comment for you
Make those charts explode.
BASED
Yeah! I’m doing my part!
Because that Picard maneuver guy carries the Lemmy network with a ton of spicy memes. A true real one
<3
We need your buddy, the Riker maneuver.
I actually named my Mastodon account that.
I like that my profile (on mobile at least) looks like he's Riker maneuvering a Riker maneuver:
Cocky cowboy move or really back injury, we will never really know.
https://screenrant.com/star-trek-riker-chair-maneuver-jonathan-frakes-explained/
We appreciate the content bro
Thanks! Just trying to do my part to help the fediverse take off.
This is from Insurrection, right?
Yes, I believe so. I've only seen the TNG movies once, so my memory is a little fuzzy.
Insurrection, yup.
Geordi only has the visor in Generations, pretty sure this is a TNG episode
The comment you’re replying to is replying to a comment with Picard doing a little dance. Thats from Insurrection.
Your mention of Geordi makes me think you’re looking at the comment with Geordi sitting as Riker does his maneuver, which is out of the comment chain.
You’re right, MrGG asked if it was Insurrection and I based my reply off the other gif right below it, wouldn’t have noticed if you hadn’t pointed it out. Live long and prosper
I feel like this was after one of those training simulator episodes where they go to different points in time but I'm probably wrong
that guy is a legend and also confuses me every time I see him outside of a star trek community
Him and Stamets
I swear I see your username everywhere
It's probably because I've commented a couple of times. Usually I have nothing to say, but I've felt rather engaged lately.
OMG, LilDumpy left another comment! 📸
Please, please. I'm just a guy. Be sure to follow to catch a low level comment or two every few days!
Hiring: Low level guys.
Opportunities: Adventurer interactions. Loot. Rumours before the bigger places hear about them.
-- Dungeon management
Same. Never commented on Reddit but here there are fewer comments so I feel like I can contribute
Commenting there seems to be like yelling into a giant void with everyone on the planet, here it feels like screaming into a smaller void with few other people who seem to be super cool.
I'm doing my part.
🫡
It could be about programming.dev and lemmynsfw.com stat changes: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4235
TL;DR: By default, Lemmy only counts posts and comments for active users. These instances also started counting the votes. According to Lemmy NSFW admin, there are 3 times more active users with lurkers.
Given all the different ways “active” is defined we may as well just collect all the meanings available.
Mastodon and Twitter etc, for example, count logging on as active.
While I can see the argument for voting, it is qualitatively different from posting/commenting. Knowing both, as well as log in numbers too might make sense. But muddying the waters is probably confusing … though it is interesting that any instance can define what it means by “active”.
I would say that voting isn't actually different from posting/commenting. It's a process whereby a user takes part in a discussion/topic/post. In an ideal world, everyone would post, but we shouldn't act like active people who don't feel like they have anything to say explicitly, aren't here.
Totally agree. Even when two commenters are replying to one another, there is always another layer where they are also addressing everyone in the thread/community/instance/fediverse, which obviously includes lurkers.
The votes shape everything about the platform, so ignoring the lurkers in the stats feels like it's missing an important data point.
Ah, that could be it. I would like other instances to do the same, to me ama voting lurker is an active user
Absolutely. Other social media platforms count as active when we mistakenly enter their sites :)
Okay, that makes more sense, I was trying to figure out what had changed in the past week. I'm very curious to see how that data would look for other servers too. I think it's more logical to count users even if they don't post or comment, because they are still a critical part of the whole ecosystem if they browse and vote regularly. Even without saying anything, their thoughts and opinions help shape the content and discourse through voting.
And for that matter, weekly active users and daily active users would be two other interesting datapoints. You can see the daily and weekly users on the sidebar of instances, but I don't know of any tool/site that scrapes all of that info and displays it in an easily digestible format.
FTFY
if you switch to daily stats you can see a big bump on the 4th, and a smaller bump on the 5th, is that when they made this change?
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats
I think if you exclude those 2 days we're still on a very very slight downward trend, but once every instance adopts the new method it'll be interesting to see what the trend is after that, it could be that users get tired or posting/commenting and fallback to being lurkers
If you look closely, the downward trend actually stopped before the change in stats. We dipped below 33,000 in mid-November, but then started hovering above 33,000 for multiple weeks until the bump.
I came to Lemmy after Reddit's crackdown on third-party clients. Looking back, I'm pretty happy with how Lemmy is going and how it feels right now. The number of users decreased after the initial spike, sure, but it also stabilized at a respectable level. There are things I'm still missing, but the way it is definitely works for me.
Same situation for me. This is such a nice place compared to reddit. I still think it would be better if it grows some more, but one of the nice things about Lemmy is that it has a more "niche" user base
Yeah, same here. I'm not nearly as active here as I was on reddit, but there's not as much going on here and activity feeds itself. It's fine, I read more books.
For me, it's the opposite. Only ever lurked on Reddit, but started posting and commenting more here. Feels more inviting.
Same here
I’m trying to use lemmy more
I’m posting more on lemmy now
I'm in danger
I bent my wookie.😥
I prefer quality over quantity, but more quality is always welcome. I'm not going back to reddit. The reddit alien is about to become the Borg of the shareholders.
Same here unironically
It’s good to see more people moving to lemmy
Honestly, it’s not surprising. They seem very ban-happy there lately, with accounts getting banned over nothing. And I’ve seen a fair few subs getting the axe as well. When a site gets actively hostile to users and lets mods run their own little dictatorships, people eventually get fed up with it.
Lemmy isn’t Reddit, but at least it’s… also not Reddit :D
I wonder how much of that has to do with fighting between moderators and subs being forcefully reopened
A large number of subs were forceful reopened, and the mods replaced with trash people who just wanted to have mod powers. The purge of people who gave a fuck, is done. I'm starting to see posts and news show up here on Lemmy before reddit. Which kinda makes sense, all the most active posters were forced out or quit and moved here.
This place shall not die. Keep the party going guys.
Same here
I’m trying to use lemmy more and post more content
Related to the recent reddit mobile site update that straight up breaks the website perhaps? (Cant scroll, can’t interact)
Don't these people test their shit before release? Hobby devs have better qc than reddit
I thought that may have been intentional anti-adblock (just speculating).
Was my first thought. /r/friends doesn't work on the mobile site now and that's the only thing I ever go to back to Reddit for anymore. That's one content stream I can't duplicate anywhere else.
I used to look to Reddit when big news broke because it was always on the front page within minutes. This past year there have been a few times that big news stories weren't even on the top few pages. I gave Lemmy a try, and it feels just like reddit from 2013. I love it. I'm home.
I still go to Reddit for American politics, my cities sub, and /r/nfl.
But I haven't made a single comment and treat it more as a news aggregator than a proper community. And even that is happening less and less as I get more comfortable with the pacing of the community here.
On Reddit you can make a clever comment at the right time and get thousands of upvotes and sidebar conversations. It's great for a shot of that sweet, sweet dopamine.
On Lemmy, I rarely get more than 5-10 upvotes, but the conversations are meaningful and nuanced.
People are realizing that Lemmy is not a 1:1 drop-in replacement and are adjusting their expectations and behavior accordingly. Hopefully we'll hit a critical mass soon.
I never experienced reddit 2013 but reddit's front page is gone. They've swapped out r/all for r/popular on new reddit, videos and screenshots are everywhere instead of links and they've even renamed themselves to "the heart of the internet"
Upwards and onwards!
We must move forward, not backward, upward, not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!
Hexbear be like 🥱
i have been posting for 3 years!
🥱
Yeah shit, it was when redditors found you freaks that most of them left
Good. Lemmy, like Reddit, is fundamentally user driven platform. The most important thing for the life of it is people making posts.
True, too bad reddit is a bot driven platform now.
Bots are posting shit on Lemmy too you know.
Reddit is so censored it's pointless. Almost all the comments seem like they're written by bots or gov guys with square haircuts who think this is what "those nerds" talk like
IMO reddit has loads of bullshit bots and boosting but sadly it has some good targeted communities too.
why is this making me laugh so much xD
Most posts are essentially ads in disguise. Bots are the ones running the show here too though.
Is this about hexbear and lemmygrad? These accusations have never made sense to me. They have been here long before it became popular and they had the same opinions back then. It makes no sense and is a waste of resources to have bunch of bots posting stuff when there is no one to read those posts.
So true, lol.
unfortunately other data is not encouraging , the number of servers is both down since the exodus and in the recent month.
I think the number of servers is a interesting metric to look on, it correlates with users who are tech savy and are early adopters, before the exodus the number of servers was growing consistently , despite the number of users mostly staying the same, That was IMO an indication of the relative quality of lemmy at the time and indeed it seemed to got the most benefits from the exodus out of all the reddit alternatives.
compare that with peertube which shows consistent growth in the number of servers (see this month, and long term), I think what makes them better then lemmy currently is that they currently seem better at prioritizing feature development by using a dedicated site.
Also the total donations have declined in the last month (from €3962 to €3,771 today), So i think we should try to not get overconfident and work to secure the future of lemmy or some other open source reddit alternative.
this is normal. we'll go through a lot of similar waves. people start servers, realize they're a lot of work, and then abandon them. servers that foster a healthy community will survive. hexbear's worst cycle involved losing the entire administrative team just weeks after a large percentage of the website left. don't sweat the growing pains - work together to learn, grow, and change.
Before the Reddit exodus, I don't remember many active servers besides Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad (there was Lemm.ee and Lemmy.ca but they both had like 3 posts a week). Hexbear wasn't federated, and servers were mostly being desperately spun up in anticipation for a flood of users who would crash the network.
The donations being down is bad though. I would love for at least Lemmy.ml to sticky a post asking for funding; one has to look no further than Thunderbird to see how well that works.
There were about 80 before the exodus (may 2023), compared to to 40 (may 2022) and 15 (may 2021), about double the servers every year which is good considering this is "word to mouth" growth, even older data shows a clear growth trend, my guess is that i and others didn't really see them because they are some dude community, even today i think i will have a problem listing more then 5-10 lemmy servers.
beehaw and the science instance were also fairly active before the exodus, and midwest.social was like, a little active
I would use Lemmy more if people on here weren’t so toxic. It’s been bringing out the toxicity in me more than I’m comfortable with. Too many confidently incorrect people speaking on topics they have absolutely no experience in, complex discussion completely boiled down to platitudes without any nuance, and tribalism that rivals what’s on Twitter.
Mac and Windows users are immediately downvoted for not sucking down Linux’s balls in every scenario, a complete cesspool of discussion with regard to Israel and Palestine appears all over the most popular posts, straw men and bad faith discussion appears in every community (with rare exception), and deification of the popular faces in the orbit of any topic without any room for critical thought around their positions is the norm. Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria.
I was excited for the fediverse after watching the slow decline of Digg, /., Reddit, etc. but it’s obvious that the worst parts of those platforms are creeping up here too and there’s nothing to be done except wade through the sewage to get to things that are interesting and insightful. It’s a shame but Lemmy will never be as popular as the alternatives were. Techie incels rooted in here too early.
Edit: I’m now banned from /c/technology (or at least shadowbanned on one instance) for not accepting their arguments on piracy. This is what I mean. There’s no nuance here.
I'm gonna tell you something.
While reading your comment i became more and more convinced it would end with and don't let this man distract you from the fact that in 1998, the Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table.
Except then you didn't.
Which was a bummer.
You know… I’m gonna tell you something too.
I usually debate throwing that in there and then I realize that, outside of Reddit, that thing doesn’t really work anymore. It’s not an original idea. It doesn’t add anything to the discussion. Outside of being a meme and an occasional source of a good chuckle, Lemmy is too young for something like that. There’s not enough good content here to justify repeated jokes and junk like “Oh no! He broke both his arms! Where’s mom?”
If that means that this is a bummer for you, then I think you need to reevaluate what you’re trying to get from Lemmy. It reminds me of the time when 2 years before the new millennium, the Undertaker threw his adversary, Mick, off of the cage in a match called Hell in a Cell and plummeted 16 feet through the table of the announcers giving commentary on the match. Although it may have been entertaining the first time it happened, it probably wasn’t as funny to the person that was dropped and probably why he never attempted it again.
All that’s to say, be careful what you wish for.
We need to change the way we interact with social media.
My advice, points don't matter and you don't deserve anyone a debate.
Drop the phone or press back and go next if it feels toxic.
Internet should serve you and not the other way around.
If you have something to share, make your essay in a different post with the appropriate documentation and let it sit for someone else to find.
Block toxic people and tell them why you blocked them.
Meh. Life's too short. Probably better to just block and move on.
Works too.
Agreed 100%. I don’t use social media at all with Lemmy being the only exception and, as I stated in my original post, I’m not really having a good time here so I’m spending less and less of it on the platform. It’s incredibly unwelcoming here.
I like the way you think.
I can relate to your frustration about jerks and toxicity but I dont share the severity of it. At least I would not say it that way.
Yes, lemmy can get pretty bad (looking at you c/firefox) but that’s normal with niche stuff.
I moderate a smallish subreddit (2k peeps) and get regular questions if I can please ban the noobs that ask noob questions. I politely decline.
This place here is in its literal infancy and saying „its so sad that it will never…“ helps nobody.
Just report assholes, check if you made mistakes and if nothing else helps, make a new community based on that change. That is how we improve. Moaning and spelling doom is a bad strategy in every part of life.
How is /c/firefox a niche community? You’re just reinforcing what I’m saying. The biggest communities here are filled with the worst kinds of people. The ones that should be the most welcoming to entice new users and more discussion are the ones that are the least welcoming.
I do report assholes and I have made some communities but no one joins them when their first attempt at joining Lemmy is being downvoted repeatedly for saying “Windows 11 isn’t as bad as I thought it would be” in the tech communities and then never commenting again.
I’m not moaning and spelling doom. I’m pointing out that if Lemmy ever expects to grow to the point where it’s a realistic alternative to sites like Reddit, then the moderation and, by extension, the users need to lighten up and be open to discussion that may not agree with them.
As was to be expected, you got me wrong. I don’t know if intentional or not but let me explain:
c/firefox isn’t niche, lemmy and the fediverse are.
The biggest communities always have the largest variety of people and will have a lot of demand in moderating, not lemmy‘s strong suit as we‘re still debating if „moderation bad“ or we‘d like to silence bullies.
I‘d also like to see your scientific study that proves the communities that should be most welcoming are the least. This kind of black/white claim isn’t helpful for debate.
Windows 11 be what it may. You shouldn’t be downvoted for using it, correct. I have been downvoted like hell for other inconspicuous things. Thats unfortunate and something you can change by talking about it with people. Make posts, engage, but maybe try to stay on the „i want this to succeed“ instead of „this is going to fail“ side.
The fediverse in general is still finding its identity. You can be part of that if you decide to have meaningful debate.
Btw. opening communities and have nobody join is not a lemmy thing. That happens on reddit as well. It’s only a question if you can hit the right nerve. I‘m neurologically incapable of doing so since I‘m very different from others but some do. Maybe try helping out in other communities and help out that way.
Have a good one.
On the other hand, since Lemmy is made up of a much smaller userbase, I've had a lot of success with just blocking users. When it's one user with 100 comments, it's a lot easier to solve the issue with the tools available to you as a user than on Reddit where you're more likely to have 100 different people making 1-3 comments each spouting blind rhetoric/useless exaggeration/unfunny meme responses. It's not big enough for people to bother too much with alt accounts or brigading yet either.
I do my best to stay away from posts with topics likely to attract that sort of crowd too.
In general while it's not as good as I hoped for, I find Lemmy/fediverse a hell of a lot better than what I left. People are going to be assholes wherever they think they can get away with it, and the best response is to starve them of attention.
Fair enough. I find that with the federation, blocking people just results in my feed being emptier than I’d like to be. It’s already pretty sparse. Removing even more of it just because someone was an idiot in a singular, particular topic seems like overkill for such a small space. We’re just barely getting over the hump where new content is showing regularly enough to where the front pages aren’t filled with the same posts for days. And, even then, it’s not great content.
Have you considered blocking people you don't want to interact with?
Yes. Not only have I considered it. I’ve done it. The issue is that the Lemmy communities aren’t that big, even when you’re not referring to smaller instances and just sticking to federated communities, so blocking people just for dumb comments means you’re removing more and more of an already small user base.
It’s a solution to be sure. It’s just not one that I’d care to use right now when me blocking someone doesn’t actually help what I’m perceiving as the issue that is keeping Lemmy from growing.
I use Boost because it has a tagging feature. So instead of blocking people with smoking hot trash takes I tag them so I can read their posts and comments with scepticism in the future.
I only block people who troll and do nothing else.
It's really helpful for not shrinking the pool of comments or posts I can read.
I may need to try another app, then. That sounds useful.
Yeah, I feel like with Reddit I had the opposite problem.
There are so many low-effort, memey comments that blocking each user who engaged in it would cause me to block half the site!
That's the point, though. You're being hyperbolic to suggest that you could even attempt to block half of Reddit. On Lemmy, you could probably actually do that, depending on the instance.
My point is that there's no point in blocking each annoying account on reddit because there are so many.
Yes, I got that. Hence my reply. But they also make up less total numbers than the rest of the user base. That’s not the case here because the user base is so small.
Mmm, relatively speaking, most reddit posts (>50%) have become low-effort/pandering garbage that isn't worth reading.
You act like that’s a new thing.
Also, case in point: Both our posts have gotten downvoted already. How is that even possible for such benign replies?
I thought we were talking about blocking users, not downvoting them.
The thread we’re in, that I started, was about how unwelcoming Lemmy is for new and casual users. This entire interaction is just highlighting it.
I see your point.
A lot of "technical" users are on lemmy who can't tolerate dissenting opinions. Thankfully the mods seem to be doing a 'decent' job of keeping things in check on both sides.
Speaking of the Simpsons, do you think the people on alt.nerd.obsessive were better?
Who said anything about the Simpsons? 😘
I never went there, to be honest. All my newsgroups were programming/computer/game related or were piracy groups. I think, in general, newsgroups were better because there was a barrier of entry that was required to get there. Now that anyone can just download an app and spew whatever garbage they want in seconds, we have what we have.
Are you old enough to remember actual flame wars on Usenet, etc.? That's what I'm talking about. The people who invented the term "flame war" weren't deterred by a high barrier to entry.
I am old enough to remember that. It wasn’t a huge part of what Usenet was. I remember downloading the original DooM shareware and finding an entire community of people that were super helpful and showed me resources for how to make my own maps and levels. I learned all about programming, making websites, and video editing. Maybe I got in earlier than you did or something, I’m not sure. For the most part, it was a group of highly technical, highly educated people looking for other people with similar interests. It was great.
Only a matter of time before reddit fucks up again, so we better get the good places before the second wave of migration
They keep a/b testing and rolling out worse and worse mobile websites. They've gone and done it again. For any regular mobile website user that wasn't affected by the 3rd party app issue, or for anyone who switched from a 3rd party app to the website because it wasn't as bad as the 1st party app, well... Now it is. Now it's possibly worse.
So, we might hope for a prolonged period of organic growth now. Especially if Lemmy doesn't get flooded with meta discussions again.
I started using Lemmy since September 2022 I think, but I rarely open it, two weeks ago I was permabanned on reddit for report abuse, then semi-unbanned, so I deleted my account, and now I'm starting to use Lemmy actively, there are a lot more servers and users now and I found a new nice server.
I'm wondering if it'll be similar to people switching from (convenient & centralized) Compuserve and AOL to (difficult but p2p) email and web. That took years.
Slow and steady wins the race.
Prodigy! Don’t forget Prodigy! :)
I'm glad to see this. I was mostly a lurker at the old place for over 10 years.
Creating posts and commenting at times was difficult and often they were deleted due to some rule or issue. The worst was when users would message to let me know the post had been deleted and they knew due to some other form of the site they were using.
In all my years of managing Forums before this period it wasn't that hard to create new topics and participate so I gave up.
I started lurking here at Lemmy then starting seeing this theme about user engagement going down and not enough content. When I would end up back at the old place after a Google search on something I could see the volume number differences between lemmy and there so I decided to try posting again.
So far it's been a lot easier especially in sh1tposting. I did run into a couple of hiccups but overall it's been a lot easier.
I'll enjoy it while it lasts as over time with more users things will change, at least for now the posts are not drowning in comments by the thousands yet. I can keep up with that. It kind of reminds me of my old forum days in the early 2000s.
Had to use the reddit app the other day.. That people can stand to be on there still is beyond me. I like it here on the fediverse and im not going back
You can still use old.reddit.com on your preferred browser without the app just fyi
I go back every now and then. Immediately reminded of why I left.
I’ve noticed that there seems to be a lot of activity, enough to replace Reddit, on the most popular communities and instances. Even my more niche communities such as !fantasyfootball@lemmy.world has had more activity lately. Although the niche ones have a way to go to be replacements for their counterparts on Reddit
Good, we need an alternative to Reddit that isn't manipulated
Give it time and there will be bad actors trying to manipulate Lemmy.
It does kind of have a problem with mod abuse but that's on a per-community or instance basis, so it's nowhere near as bad.
How do they handle bots? Seems to me this statistic could be heavily inflated. Or do they account for that?
Here is their listing of users per instance, looks a bit sus to me ("Benutzer" means "Users"):
It's active users, not total users. I'm not sure on the exact metric, but users need to post, comment, vote or whatever to be counted for this statistic.
Bots on alien.top do that afaik. They impersonate real Reddit users after all.
I don't think I understand your point about them impersonating users? It seems to me like an account gets created for everyone using the portal. It then provides you a password and you can start using that account. I tried it just now and it seems like your account gets flagged as bot on creation automatically. So most people posting from that domain, might just not have unchecked that "I'm a bot"-tick and are actual former Reddit users.
Creating an account doesn't make a user active though, but for the question if a bot posting stuff counts as an active user or not, I honestly can't say.
Afaik the bot auto-creation is disabled now, but it used to mirror some Reddit subreddits by automatically creating bot accounts for every Reddit user posting in them, and using that to post the same content in a Lemmy community. That's how the instance got over a million users, pretty much all of them are bots that do whatever the Reddit user with the same name is doing in one of the mirrored subreddits.
What you are describing is another part of the plan: Allowing the original Reddit users to take over their mirror accounts on Lemmy. Apparently it just creates accounts for them if no bot exists yet.
I don't think voting does count as an activity for this metric.
That's good. A lot of communities have been slowly dying 🫤 I've been using Mastodon more and more but it's not the same.
It's winter break for me so that's why I'm going to use it a bit more.
I think Thanksgiving holidays in the US and a long weekend might make the difference for a lot of people too.
You know what's actually cool?
While many suppose that majority just moved back, they didn't! Less than half of users actually left Lemmy after an exodus, and now about what, 95% of users?..are actually from there.
Worrying that this is the CHUD invasion from parler or one of those pretend places to data mine hate and sell powdered eggs, lead pills and gold to mostly helpless idiots. Some comment sections have gotten noticeable shittier and less civil lately. We don't need growth for the sake of it.
I'm a boomerang. Reddit has the content, but it's largely focused on the larger subs which are the ones I want to avoid. I'll have to decide whether or not I want to run into obvious tankies (mayo) or try to spot misinformation campaigns (reddit).
And reddit is getting worse in every way. Reddit wants to turn into an ad platform and that's the way things are going. Lot's more locked comments and posts, totally unchecked misinformation and dooming.
On iOS through firefox the google login prompt can't be closed. This is what prompted me back, I started using Voyager again.
I might come back and search for another home server, create a new account and delete my old one. Start fresh.
I can't stand reddit's god-awful user interface.
Both old and new reddit suck balls. I can't believe someone got paid for that.
I didn't mind old Reddit but the new UI just feels too busy and annoying
One issue with Reddit was the extreme even obsesive moderation level. It was totally frustrating to post stuff in some subs, lot of new people just avoid it even experienced users like me.
On the other hand… there’s a lot of Lemmy threads with flame wars that should really be pruned from the post by mods. The flame wars bring a lot of negativity and noise that takes away from the actual discussion
Yes in most circumstances. It's valuable to let people speak, but not for like 5 comments back and forth.
Lemmy desperately needs a "take it to DMs" policy.
I respectfully disagree - it's very easy to contract comment threads you have no interest in (at least on my client if I long-press a comment, it hides the comment and all responses), but I sometimes enjoy reading through an actual discussion two or three people have in a comment chain. They may be few and far between, but that's the nature of an open forum.
Why not? After a point, the discussion gets buried under "click here for more."
Not once did I ever get a post in r/showerthoughts past the mods. I eventually stopped trying
I got a bunch of posts removed there too, but tbh I kinda get it. 99% have the same repetitive showerthoughts and the whole sub was by design, super low effort, meaning the garbage : quality content ratio was like 500:1 so they had to rely on brutish rules
dev'd an online course web app and website for a community college. users/activity was very cyclic. could see the hits going up every Sunday night as students tried to catch up before Monday class. usage normally dropped around weekends/holidays. maybe similar surges depending on time of day.
fedi stats https://fediverse.observer/stats
Where you get data from?
analytics and local logs. apache stats. been years since I cared
I was having difficulty with servers being down and nothing loading when I first deleted Reddit. Things finally seem stable so I've been a lot more active.
The apps weren't available either.
The Lemming went unto spez and said, "let my people go!"
Recently it seems like the Fediverse is a lot more quiet than before. Even in the tech and privacy communities I follow things have been rather slow lately.
Tbf, even they need a break sometimes.
I like lemmy but it's always about capitalism, linux and privacy. Even when it isn't the comments make it about any of those 3.
You've proven your own point excellently well
You arent wrong.
Lemmy is not welcoming to regular people who want to talk about normie shit.
Has to be all the yiff here.
I just wish more people were talking about Warhammer and Battletech here.
Ahem.
!warhammer40k@lemmy.world
!battletech@lemmy.world
There’s also planet of other hobby communities. Get in there.
Me and my animal communication community know what ya mean
!digitalbioacoustics@lemmy.world
I was just wondering if this month would be the one where we see another upward trend. Glad that seems to be the case!
oh lawd they comin
LET'S GOOOOOOOOOOOO
I'm so glad I moved here
we found the first resonance to the step response
Activity
That’s great news.
I get logged out every time I change VPN location, and sometimes I'm too lazy to log back in. Does being logged out count as inactive?
I think you have to post or comment, but it's over the whole month
What I noticed is the server I used to login to disappeared all of a sudden so I guess all the users who were on that server couldn't login and leaving. Same is happening across fediverse.
Was it FMHY? Some instances that were created during the Reddit blackout went down to technical or logistical issues and decided to operate under other instances
Can confirm, I made an instance around the time that the blackout started - unfortunately the hardware it was running on was starting to experience some issues. It's still up and running, but for now I've made a fresh new instance on way better hardware - and this time without a subdomain 😅
I've seen this graph before. What is "Active Users Halfyear" and how is it different from "Active Users Monthly", especially since they both change and are measured... monthly?
Probably "number of users who were active this month" for monthly, versus "number of users who were active the last half year (6 mo)" for halfyear. Both can be updated monthly. A user who was active 3 months ago would be in the second group but not the first.
Hm, that makes sense. Still a little ambiguous, I think.
i moved 13 hours again and well, this place is good, so why come back?
soo what happened around December 2022?
Exciting
we out here
Yay
Lemmy had an exodus?
Reddit did