by fedidb.org
Honestly a lot of it is probably people getting comfortable lurking again, Lemmy only counts post and comments as active users
It’s funny how despite social media becoming very normal, the old phenomenon of most content getting generated by a small portion of power users persists.
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Tervell and Dirt_Owl.
I post
I’m just not clever enough to post
Well in that case, ping!
Commenting so I‘m active :)
So glad I decided to stop lurking and actually start participating right as the whole fediverse dies out, it’s not just lemmy.
I find it more comfortable to contribute to Lemmy than to other sites. There seems to be actual discussion and opportunities to learn, which can be much harder to come across on the other platforms.
And fewer comments that are clearly a chat bot.
When you come across a ‘user’ that almost exclusively defends one controversial politician/company/government and all of their comments seem to follow a script. Also the account is either brand new or 5 years old but only started posting recently.
Don’t worry! They’ve just become less obvious.
That I agree with. I don’t post often but when I do it’s always very positive and makes me want to post more . Compared to Reddit where it would have alot more negative comments or would just get removed by the mods for some stupid reason. Did you know you can no longer post on r/buildapc about asking for suggestions on building PC’s ? What’s even the point anymore?
Well, as they say: “I’m going my part”.
I try to make it a point to post questions on communities that have not kicked off yet, knowing that I most likely will not receive a response for a while.
Me no lurk. Me comment.
I’m doing my part!
Ok I am guilty of that. What about votes? Are they not counted as activity?
I’ll try to post atleast one comment every now and then.
Well count me in now
tbh its true: apart from my french instance where i like to hang out, most of Lemmy is just memes, Linux related posts, or self hosting posts. No meaningful content for ur average person really. In fact i scroll throu ‘All’ in new and reach yesterday’s posts in just few minutes, given the amount of ‘not so meaningful content’ i am filtering …
and news
It’s hard to find communities on Lemmy if they weren’t already massively popular on Reddit.
Exactly. also inputs from experts who chime in on the subject are really useful, like a semiconductor engineer suddenly replying in a comment section. There’s not much of it here thou. Yea there is sorta this lag time between Reddit and Lemmy in whichever get wind of the news first, i even, used to be a reddit reposter just to somewhat help seed this place
Lemmy tickles the same part of my brain without all the corporate bs - less content makes me scroll less, but less toxicity makes it worth it
I feel like Ive found my people and I ain’t leaving
I feel you
Happened with Mastodon too, but that’s thriving now. Users come in waves. Don’t focus on the numbers, focus on the content.
Why does this matter? Do we need to appease the shareholders or something? Do we need endless month over month growth, lest the world completely stops turning?
Do we need SYNERGIES??!!!?
Active user count is probably the single most important metric to whether a platform is successful and stays alive. Even above quality of content, as proven by many other social media platforms that thrive despite being flooded with trash content.
No one wants to hang out in a ghost town.
As a Lemmy shareholder, I’m outraged. If Lemmy doesn’t get more users soon, I am going to stop the thrusters that keep the world turning. You have been warned.
It just signals that this platform is flawed to the point where it’s bleeding to death. Keep in mind, a bigger userbase = more active community = better platform.
Maybe it’s because nobody is interested in a platform that has a worse circlejerk than even Reddit of all sites?
I want Lemmy to succeed but we need to attract more normies and at the right time when Reddit does something stupid again.
Yeah, remember the reaction when that one post got popular about lemmy being boring for anyone that wasn’t a SWE/Linux user?
People got so pissed off, one of the top posts on lemmy that day was something to the affect of “fuck you, we’re not obligated to post things you like”. Which, yeah, you’re not - but you also can’t blame people for losing interest in your platform when you only have active discussion on one or two relatively niche topics.
The fact is that Lemmy is garbage for discussing hobbys or interests outside of a few niche areas. On reddit my feed was filled with woodworking, 3d printing, Astronomy, and other topics that get very little traffic on lemmy.
My lemmy feed is mostly politics, then SWE stuff, then memes
woodworking, 3d printing, Astronomy
I am surprised this isn’t more popular on Lemmy frankly.
Got some bad news for you, brother.
The normies you refer to are going to use reddit and twitter until they die.
I dunno. I blame lack of engagement. We have to post content. Engage. I see tons of posts upvoted but a huge lack of OC. If we don’t use the platform, it dies.
Let’s look at some numbers and do some napkin math:
Currently, the top post of Lemmy can usually get a little more than 2K upvotes, which puts Lemmy at about late 2010 to early 2011 reddit level of activity, which is right before reddit hits its explosive growth phase in 2012 with SOPA, Kony, and the Obama AMA. While active user count has been going down, the amount of post and comments have both been steadily going up.
You also have to realize that in more than a decade, there was never a reddit alternative that has EVER hit this level of activity. (unless you count 9gag or the_donald for some reason.)
You also have to realize that in more than a decade, there was never a reddit alternative that has EVER hit this level of activity.
That is a very important point that doesn’t get mentioned enough. Lemmy is the largest and most active reddit alternative around. All the other sites that tried to capitalize on the API disaster have laughable numbers of users and most posts rarely have more than 10 votes or interactions.
How’s kbin doing? Granted they federate with Lemmy so it’s like asking about an instance. But not quite the same
Kbin is doing pretty well, they are still holding on to about 6,000 MAUs. Lemmy still has around 32,000, for comparison. Lemmy peaked around 66,000 MAUs at the end of July, but a big chunk of that was probably alt accounts that have since gone dormant.
Kbin’s main developer had some major IRL events that coincided with the reddit exodus so he wasn’t really able to do much work on the code for a while. But now he is back, and another team has also made a fork of kbin called mbin.
Federation is still pretty janky with kbin, so I think that activity should pick up on both sides once we get some software updates and more intermingling of the kbin and Lemmy userbases.
OP is also spot on about this being the largest that a reddit alternative has ever gotten. I’m pretty sure alternatives such as discuit, squabble, tildes, etc have never even approached 10k MAUs, so we are already well past that. If not for the fact that this platform is federated, there would probably already be much more activity. However, the federated structure should become more and more useful as we grow larger, so it’s a worthy sacrifice even if it’s stunting activity for the time being.
That is a very astute observation, and I would not worry about the temporary decline for this very reason.
Also, looking at your username… ”can somebody please find Margot Robbie so that I can make sense of all this”
That’s esteemed Academy Award nominated character actress Margot Robbie to you!
You should have seen Lemmy before June 2023. All posts were from the same five people. For now the community seems to be alive and healthy.
Yep, I’m jaded in my expectations knowing what Lemmy was prior to the massive expansion through June and July…
It was still a fun place, but it was a couple dozen posts a day across all servers, by a handful of people from the bigger servers.
We still have a lot of fixes to make on Lemmy, especially on the moderation, management, and content filtering side of things (though apps have been thankfully filling the gaps on some of these issues). Niche communities still need more participation to get off the ground. I’ll see again where we are in a few months from now.
It was always bound to happen after a massive user gain. Frankly, we should be quite happy we can get over 400 comments in a thread. That’s not insubstantial for a very niche platform.
i don’t care. I came here because i’m so sick of reddit.
Its alright, we all have lives we live and sometimes don’t have time for Lemmy.
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I moved to Lemmy over from reddit not because of content or better UI but because people behind reddit seems like jerks to me and i came to realization I’d rather use open source.
What i lack here is information e.g. programming communities in Lemmy are, well, dead. If left on Lemmy things that are “recommended” to me it’s sensational “news” that are aimed to spark woke vs others battle in discussion.So what to make better ?
- to build what reddit has, I’d call it a content library and i don’t care if it’s done by bots or humans. For me the facts + discussion to ask question is super important.
- if searching for a topic outside of Lemmy> Lemmy doesn’t show up in search engine but reddit does. Some optimization needs to be done to get better score at search engines.
- let users to block instances and thus make de-federation to user’s decision.
- i think there needs to some kind of cross instance community, i don’t think having same kind of community in multiple instances with different content is good solution.
Some optimization needs to be done to get better score at search engines.
i don’t think having same kind of community in multiple instances with different content is good solution.
On the first point: If we have more people, we will have more content and more visits, and search engines will rank us higher. Hard problem to solve. A bit chicken and egg. Glad you raise it.
On the second point: This really frustrated me. I had issues knowing which manga community to join. In addition, multiple instances means multiple communities and means more fragmentation. If we could bring us all together…
Simply high visit rate is not enough. Every site that wants increase organic traffic has to do SEO at some point.
As for second point yeah, exactly fragmentation is frustrating .
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It’s very simple, most of the posts here are circle jerks (Linux, FOSS, boy howdy aren’t we better than Reddit, communism) or rage bait.
I only come here when I’m having a good day and I want to reel myself in a bit
Edit: see below to see how far Lemmy users will go to circle jerk how much better they are than Reddit
Yeah the “All” in particular is pretty bad for the average person. They’re not going to enjoy a Star Trek meme, followed by a Arch meme, a Self-hosted post, a grad-student Science meme, followed by a privacy post.
I’m also convinced Lemmy’s “hot” algorithm is broken; I can easily find posts with ONE UPVOTE on the all feed. Hot is supposed to be a balance between acceleration and total vote count, but it seems like it just only acceleration. Go look at the front page of reddit. The difference is night and day.
We need a normie.world that has an “all” feed that doesn’t contain 70% niche communities. We have c/humor, c/news, etc but they’re completely diluted by overpowered niche posts.
Also a weirdly large amount of “death to America” and whatnot.
While I don’t entirely disagree, I’m a little confused by your description of the front page of lemm.ee, which we’re both on. My front page when viewing All here is mostly memes/shitposts/news/technology when set to Active sort, is yours not?
I’ve admittedly blocked a fair amount and have show NSFW/bot posts disabled, but the communities you mention aren’t affected by that.
Yeah I could’ve been more clear. I mean the All feed not Local. I went and updated my comment. And to be fully clear, I’ve got no complaints about lemm.ee. It’s exactly what I want, e.g. show me everything and I’ll decide what to block. That said, I know I’m not the norm.
Saying you blocked a fair amount is exactly what I’m talking about, so have I. A little bit of effort can really make the feed more palletable. We need to have a place where that is done by default. Maybe even an open source AI or even just an algorithm that tailors it to the user. I’m already glad Lemmy.world is much more moderate than lemm.ee, and we just need a place that goes all the way; NSFW blocked by default, several communities blocked-by-default (not defederated), and somehow prevents All from being flooded by niche memes. I love Linux and the memes (even if they get a bit repetitive) but we shouldn’t have 3 of the top 10 posts be linux memes.
I tried to get my lab mate, a PhD in computer science and Linux Mint user, to get a Lemmy. He took one look at the all page, laughed, pointed out the circle jerk stuff and asked how some junk posts even made it to the all page and then said “yeah, no thanks” and has never touched Lemmy since. He was already 4 times more likely than the average person, but even he was instantly turned off.
I gotcha. Fwiw I kind of agree, even beyond Lemmy I’ve been a little surprised some of these sites/instances haven’t done more to tailor themselves to accommodate more folks or focus on specific demographics.
That’s supposed to be one of the big perks of the federation approach, being able to create more distinct communities, but outside of a few, they largely seem to run the software as-is, maybe with some backend adjustments to help reduce the costs of operation or the like.
Yeah, and maybe that means I should try making such an instance. I don’t have the funds for something like lemmy.world, but I’ve got the technical background. So maybe that’ll turn into my winter break project
Don’t forget firefox
Lol, yesterday it felt like there was at least half a dozen posts about Firefox, mostly claiming that YouTube was slowing them down. Which seemed really bad at first, till I dug into it and saw it was probably an unintended bug with ad handling.
And why were there so many posts? Who wants to see the same post more than once?
I have a potentially contentious opinion. Normies are what ruined Reddit and the crowd attracted by normie communities are why Reddit is even more toxic than it used to be.
We don’t need to attract normies, we just need to attract more people like us.
I don’t hate normies by any means, but I don’t want to hang out with them all day either.
Yeah I completely disagree. Imagine if a city/local gov wanted to use Lemmy in order to be self hosted (similar to EU govs switching to Mastodon) but the public just wonders why their local gov put their stuff on a weird circle jerk website that’s flooded with niche memes. “Why didn’t they use the normal thing (i.e. reddit)?”
We should be welcoming enough that, when someone wants to make a new subreddit, they make Lemmy community instead. And I don’t think thats the case right now.
That’s fair. Hadn’t considered that
“Memes that people don’t get are unwelcoming.”
If a person sees something they’ve never seen before, and turns around and flees, that’s a problem with them being sheltered and pathetic, not a problem with the new thing they haven’t encountered before.
It’s not fleeing as much as it is being so bored that that they never really find the motivation to come back.
Nothing more normie than tribalism.
Then go use Reddit if you want all the normies around. There’s a site that already exists that meets your desires. I still use it for niche content, but there has been an undeniable increase in toxicity on Reddit as the user count has increased.
Incredible.
Typical down vote and smarmy useless comments. Feels like you want to go back home.
Using normie unironicaly, you never left home.
The worst part of trying to appeal more to normies is how they hand out bans like they’re candy.
Gotta appeal to advertisers that want the normie eye balls.
I hate using the word normie, because these people truthfully haven’t done anything wrong. It’s the advertisers that follow them around like vampires that are the issue.
We need a normie.world
It’s called reddit and that’s why I left. Fuck the normies. They’ll import fascism.
That sounds unnecessarily combative so let me expand my argument.
There’s a book called The Authoritarians by a man called Bob Altermyer. Altermyer is now retired but he was a professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba. During his career he did a lot of research into authoritarians, both followers and leaders. In the book he describes for laypeople the experiments and the findings. If you want to do a deep dive into his statistical analysis you can because the whole thing is fully referenced but for people who just want an easy to read description that is also easy to understand then this is the book for you.
After reading the book redditors behaviour became a lot more easy to understand. I was less upset by what was going on but I stopped engaging because I now understood that reddit wasn’t a site for me anymore. It was a site for people that enjoyed being normal and doing normal things. And that’s ok, why shouldn’t they be catered for?
I use reddit and lemmy exclusively on desktop or laptop. So when the app business came up I didn’t regard it as my fight, however I thought that if I expected people to stand up for my interests if they are challenged I should show a bit of solidarity with them. So I didn’t visit reddit at all for the days it was blacked out. I didn’t like how spez reacted. I saw that people were crossing to the fediverse and I took a look for myself. I liked it. I posted. I wasn’t attacked for having a non-normie viewpoint. I liked that a lot.
The thing about normies is they don’t read scientific studies for fun, they don’t like long winded explanations about why the world is the way it is. They think they can see something in the street and extrapolate an entire social policy from it and there are chancers that will tell them, ‘You know what? You’re right. We don’t need experts telling you that you’re wrong, what do they know?’
So your Jordan Petersons and your Nigel Farages and Alex whatever his nameis, these people and reddit’s normie audience are made for each other. I’ll even go as far as to say this extends to the people that think the Democrats or the Labour Party are going to fix their problems, Team Liberal aren’t doing themselves any favours but my point is that if your goal is a massive website that caters to the largest part of the reddit audience you’re going to end up swimming in cryptofascist and sometimes outright fascist content. Been there, seen that, got the t-shirt.
Interesting, I think I’ll take a look. You sorta skipper over what ‘normie’ or reddit behaviour was mentioned in his book specifically. Was it the lack of reading scientific articles you mentioned in another paragraph, that alone can’t be it right?
Listen, just go and read the thing; it will be time better spent than listening to me precis it from memory. but if you do read it a feel like it hasn’t given you an insight into what drives a whole host of behaviour that one sees on social media or that I’ve misunderstood the book then do come back to me and I will refresh my memory of the book to have that discussion with you.
Yeah, that’s fair enough, gotta do my own homework some of the time.
Isn’t Lemmy suposed to be FOSS? I thought that was the main reason why people left Reddit for Lemmy was that and API changes. Wouldn´t other FOSS be of interestt too? Just a thought.
That’s not lemmy, that’s all social media (albite divisive topics are a bit different among different communities).
This is a hot take, but I think humanity is slowly turning it’s back on social media because of it’s toxic nature. You can only open a browser and get your nuts kicked so many times before you finally decide you don’t like getting your nuts kicked.
humanity is slowly turning it’s back on social media
Are you living in a parallel universe or something? Are we talking for the same humanity that is 24/7 on Instagram and on tiktok?
I really wish you’re right but I’m afraid that the minorities you may know who just abandoned Facebook are not representing humanity
Hmm, yeah I definitely see how I am biased there. I’ve been on social media since its inception, so my opinion is likely influenced mostly by people who have experienced social media for ~2 decades and are sick of it now.
Hey don’t forget about the other half of the posts, which are in a language you don’t understand. Seriously, my block list is long because language settings here mean nothing, and while I’m sure that’s quality content, uh, I can’t understand it.
I exclusively surf “top 6 hours” and I’ve actually noticed an uptick in niche community content, lately. Different kind of growth, maybe a sort of settling into itself, finally.
If everyone is browsing by top-6-hour I think we need to rethink the sorting of things.
Oh yeah, the sort here kind of sucks. Also just using the site, you lose your place/sort if you click into a link or the comments. Like, if I’m on page 2 of Top 6 Hours, click a link, and then click back into the scroll… pretty sure I just see the first page of Active again until I either refresh or change pages.
That could definitely be improved as well.
I don’t think Voyager has this problem. Highly, highly recommend, both on desktop and mobile. The UI is slick enough that it’s kept me here. All I do is laugh at shit memes but it’s perfect
I sort by New. Bring it all on.
New gets… Weird
