Honestly a lot of it is probably people getting comfortable lurking again, Lemmy only counts post and comments as active users
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.
Don’t worry! They’ve just become less obvious.
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.
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?
Did you know you can no longer post on r/buildapc about asking for suggestions on building PC’s ?
Yeah it’s like a sub for a specific narrow purpose then people get buthurt about how people are always making the same posts over and over. So they turn it in to a wiki to “address repetitive spam” or whatever, so at that point you might as well just refer to one of the hundreds of other build lists found on other reputable sites. A lot of the productive hobby subs turn in to “hey check out my [reddit hyped product]!” and people actually posting things they’ve put effort in get little to no attention.
Definitely trying to interact more, Lemmy is a gift imo.
I feel like mastodon is doing alright.
The fediverse is not dying out, don’t be dramatic.
For me Mastodon is still growing and getting more interesting, with more and more formal institutions joining (newspapers, NGOs, government institutions etc.).
I comment on stuff to try to make discussions active, it rarely works.
It has to be authentic, you can’t just comment to comment.
That’s just not true. I’ve made comments that I thought desirve no reply but humans find a way. If there’s no comments to read the shared content just isn’t that interesting. If I see comments then the shared content must be interesting enough to justify a discussion.
I can agree with that, but being authentic definitely helps the conversations take off.
Of course it helps. But some of my shitty comments are scaping the bottom of the barrel of my knowledge or patience with the replier…
I comment because I crave validation from Internet strangers.
I agree.
That’s a very good comment
You know what? i just did!
This is something I’ve learned from online game forums. You actually have to be divisive to get a high amount of concurrent users.
It only seems to be the shit-shows that anyone feels obligated to post in.
Well I think you’re wrong, fuck you and your opinion /s
I actually don’t know to what extent I agree with you, but your theory certainly feels plausible to me. It reminds me of the internet adage about how the best way to get a right answer to your question is to be wrong. I can’t remember what it’s called.
Cunningham’s law. And just to buck the trend, you didn’t have to get it wrong to get the right answer ;).
Aye, cunningham seemingly meant it as the fastest answer though, which was the sentence right afterwards in that wiki entry. So maybe mr. anarchist-with-a-machine-fetish would have gotten an answer earlier if he had said it was the anti-murphy’s law.
Division gives people something to talk about. Not everyone can think of something constructive and interesting to say at a given time, but when presented with an opinion, it is trivial for most people to formulate a comment either agreeing or disagreeing with it.
Well i think it’s stupid that we need that divisiveness
I never said it was a good thing.
And I never said you said it was a good thing.
I’ve been pretty successful and keeping conversations going! I DO comment quite a bit, though.
Time to step out of the shadows then 🤭
Commenting so I‘m active :)
I don’t know how long it counts it for, but I try to remember to comment something like once every two weeks or something
that‘s a good idea. I will copy your „way of lemmy“.
I take a break over the weekend. If I comment, I need to check the client every hour or so. I don’t want replies/rebuttals to linger without a response if it is warranted. I need to work on my car projects and can’t be bothered with online interactions whilst doing so.
That’s probably the one thing I like about lemmy that surprised me when compared to reddit. I’ve found myself commenting on posts or to replying to comments days after the initial posts, and no one seems bothered by it.
Yes, TTL is longer here. Deffo more casual.
I’m doing my part!
My comment to stop the lurk
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 in that case, ping!
Yeah, that’s probably the case.
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.
Really? Oh
Well count me in now
Time to count me back in!
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.
I wonder if those same five people are sad, presumably because their posts aren’t as popular.
No, we are sad because the decrease in posts lately have left behind the worst parts of reddit.
No, we are sad because the decrease in posts lately have left behind the worst parts of reddit.
How so?
It’s all junk food generic memes and none of the whole grain hobbyist.
If everyone is browsing by top-6-hour I think we need to rethink the organization of things.
Hi, they aren’t. I browse by Hot on All or Local specifically to discover niche and active communities. The memes I see on Lemmy are actually higher quality compared to Reddit, mostly due to the older user base here. Bonus points that we don’t have extremely toxic communities like dankmemes yet. So overall, that’s much much better for me. Even if the content was dog water, I’d still be happy about the absence of toxicity and everyone enjoying a semi-lame repetitive joke.
stopslurking
I feel caught…
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.
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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.
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.
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.
Under a centralized system, bans are terrible. But federation is awesome because it’s perfectly okay for an instance to be ban-happy. Just join another instance. (I’m on lemm.ee because I want to see everything)
Not only is it fine, but I think we actually need a variety of instances; no-bans, some-bans, lots-of-bans, and excessive-bans. People should have the choice.
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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?
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
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.
The echo chamber is as bad as reddit but less diverse and smaller. Sometimes it’s really painful.
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.
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.
Reddit’s great strength was that it was big enough that niche communities could attract enough users to have interesting conversations and a steady flow of content, and if you are a Reddit refugee looking for those sorts of communities you aren’t likely to find them on Lemmy. I’ve more or less made my peace with that, but if you’re not the kind to stand on principle, a falling user count is bad news for the hope that the Fediverse might snowball into the sort of place that can support discussions about your passions and hobbies even if they’re not the sort of thing that is popular with a specific set of tech-savvy anti-capitalist leftwing activists (and I say this with love as a fellow tech-savvy leftie… but y’all got one-track minds and it shows in what communities live and die around here).
That’s fine, there’s intelligent conversation here, it feels like reddit did ten years ago.
Yeah even a pretty unpopular car brand (Infiniti) has a pretty active sub due to the install base. I think I’m the only person here who has posted about it at all on lemmy.
I wish spez hadn’t ruined Reddit.
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.
Fuck yes.
Good days are good!
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.)
It’s worth noting that Lemmy only had around 1000 active users for the first half of 2023. (Kbin had fewer than 40 active users until May 2023!) Currently Lemmy + Kbin have about 38,000 active users.
That’s the reality of where we are. A quiet rural village that turned into a boom town, and now is finding a new normal.
I never even new lemmy existed until the reddixit and I never went back because I think lemmy is a lot less toxic. Also worth pointing out that this post alone has more than 800 likes When I firsf came around top posts had 100 likes tops
for what it’s worth, it’s a small active community. Those that stay participate, like a pre-Eternal September internet. I’ve seen memes here before they made it to reddit, that’s a shift in “power” that can’t be understated in the landscape of the internets.
I think “the good ending” looks something like that.
We aren’t beholden to stockholders, so we don’t need perpetual growth. We aren’t driven by an egomaniacal CEO so we don’t need to be the biggest social network around. We just need to find our equilibrium.
Exactly. There’s nothing out of the ordinary in that chart, just a quick growth, that led to an overshoot, and now it’s stabilizing In the next months, we will probably see a more stable pattern of linear-looking growth, with occasional peaks here and there.
Personnaly, I’m really enjoying it. You can interact without the Reddit toxicity. I miss a few specialized communities but I can live without it.
The behavior is describe as toxic definitely still exists here, and it’s worse because the morons tend to get up voted by other morons.
Yup, Lemmy is just as toxic if not more on some aspects
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That’s irrelevant, it shows that the hive mind trends toward the stupid opinion.
Yeah Reddit just sucks now. I don’t care much about karma, but it can be discouraging to type out a long answer to help someone and just get a downvote with no comment or anything. Over and over again.
The influx of people who don’t know how the site is supposed to work, on top of the usual toxicity, has just ruined it for me.
I won’t lie. I mostly don’t engage with content I see here. I didn’t do that when I was on Reddit either and mostly for the same reason: I don’t really have much to say and, even when I do have an opinion, I don’t usually want to engage in what’s often a protracted debate about something that will probably just end up being frustrating.
That’s not to say I haven’t had positive experiences on the Fediverse - I’ve had more here than anywhere else - I’m just not particularly motivated most of the time.
Well, I want to thank you for sharing your thoughts.
There are a number of thread topics on Lemmy that seem to keep going the same direction (Google, Musk, Gaza, Trump, Windows, etc.), and as you say, it can be frustrating and exhausting…
At the same tine on Lemmy, I had found articles that were worthwhile reading, updates to FOSS that I would have otherwise missed, no shortage of silly memes, and a handful of new perspectives that were positively thought provoking. Those let me look past most of the negative things and stuff that is pervasive on all kinds of forums, Reddit and social media on the whole.
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I do most of my discourse on Beehaw which is protected in many ways. When I used reddit I would often have a comment typed out ready to post and think better of it since I knew it would only drive dismissive and antagonistic responses of the stupidest kind. It may be because of the protections or it may be because of the smaller community but I find a lot less posturing and a lot more actual conversation since I’ve been using this platform. This is what keeps me here rather than reddit. It might be worth engaging in conversations you wouldn’t have on reddit when you’re interested.
I agree… Beehaw is such a wonderful and special place on the internet. I have an account there but I try to keep it separate from my main Lemmy.ca one so that I better hold myself accountable to the server rules, in order to foster nicer discourse.
I’ll happily participate with light-hearted content but otherwise I mostly feel like you when it comes to any polarising topics like politics, etc. I wish there were more content about my areas of expertise so I could participate in that but alas there’s mostly developer stuff only. Maybe I’m also not doing my best curating my feed since I tend to mostly browse all.
Social media as a whole is slowing down I think. People are starting to realize it makes them angry, sad, and annoyed.
I’m doing the least social media I’ve done since Facebook became a thing and now I realize that without those emotions I’m just kind of bored.
Find a hobby or learn something. The internet has so much to give that isn’t outrage and horror.
He’s a guy I like watching now and again building a solar array by himself
Well that was a fascinating watch. Thanks for the link. I’ll definitely be watching more of his videos.
*boring
Thanks bud.
Internet in general is becoming boring and tedious. Don’t know if it’s because of my age (Started to use internet when I was 13yo now I’m 31) but the internet isn’t that exciting and curiosity inducing place to me.
Have you continued exploring, or found yourself settling in more?
For me any place stagnates when I start settling into it, so I try to find a new angle, a new question to ask of it, and eventually something gives way to something exciting and fascinating that was right around the corner the whole time.
I continued exploring it. But, aside of one or other interesting sites that catch my attention for long periods of time (e.g. TvTropes), I can’t find internet amusing as I used to do in my childhood/teens. Sometimes I pick a good site that keep me entertained while browsing CloudHiker, but isn’t the same thing anymore.
This ain’t a problem with the internet, it’s just because you’re getting older and you’ve seen more things.
I literally bought a Lightphone II because I was spending too much time on reddit. Like, I’d stay in bed for an hour just scrolling.
I’ve recently slacked off and started keeping my iPhone (on wifi) next to me when I sleep. I loose interest in like 20 minutes.
I’ve made a point of not posting or commenting on reddit since the recent debacle, but it’s really frustrating when I have some OC that would be great for a niche community that just doesn’t exist in any real numbers on lemmy.
like Playdate dev or Framework laptop.
There’s nothing wrong with browsing your social media whereever that be Facebook or Instagram or messageboards like lemmy reddit or 4chan just as long as it’s not impacting your life. Could be a good way to catch up on friends and pass the time. Although “social media detoxing” can be really good for your mental health
Good god, I sure hope so.
People had multiple accounts because servers were unstable. Now that stability has increased we’re just abandoning the alts.
Absolutely the case for me, I had like 5-6 alts, now I use maybe two.
Can confirm.
Yep, can confirm. Over the last couple of week I closed 20.000 alts.
the average lemmy user has 3 alts factoid is just statistical error. the average lemmy user has 0 alts. alts georg, who lives on linux.community apparently and has 20,000 alts, is a statistical outlier adn should not be counted
Yeah, “monthly active users” does not necessarily mean “unique monthly active users”.
I would much rather see activity statistics like posts+comments or something like that. As long as those are looking good, then new unique users will continue to join gradually.
lemmy still isnt nearly as good as reddit was by a long shot. niche communities suck, porn sucks, c/all content isnt bad but if you scroll once youll just repeat everything on refresh.
but god damn the reddit app is terrible now and the content sucks there now too it literally feels like its trying to be a tik tok clone.
We need more idiots who can comment “this” on everything
I completely disagree. What this place needs is a bunch of bot accounts that endlessly spam the top comments from when whatever’s posted was on the front page last week.
Or the week before that I guess…
This
This
This
This
this.
psst
this
this
dis
I mostly lurk so this is me being proactive!
The quality here is far better with the exception of maybe some user generated text stories. Posts don’t just get lost in a sea of posts. The users here may not be as many, but it appears to have more consistent engagement and far less people PM’ing me offering me Amazon gift cards for feet pics.
This really is a nice place. Even most engaged posts hardly get over 50 comments usually, but 48 of those comments are on topic, sane and unique even on a fandom community. Arguments are heated but mostly contribute at least some point of view rather than being rabid spoutings that either get upvoted (or awarded) to skies above or downvoted to hell unanimously.
We have way fewer posts, even fewer do in niche communities. However, the posts on the bigger communities are quite enough to pass the time. What we actually need is more people interacting with the seemingly dead niche communities of their fandoms and interests.
Big communities keep crossposting a lot of daily news or magazine-worth happenings, which kinda gets tiring after seeing the same post for the 5th time. Hiding crossposts per user settings would be nice to prevent the feeling of only same posts being posted for interested non-fediverse users.
Agreed. I do miss my niche subreddits like druggardening, centuryhomes, unclebens, and diyprint.
3d printing is one of the things that’s pretty popular on Lemmy, actually.
If you missed them maybe you can persuade those wikifeet contributors to join your lemmy instance.
NO. NO FEET PICS. BAD.
I swear that was the best part of reddit… When I was alone there was always someone to offer me gift cards for pics >.<
What about some feet pics for some blockbuster gift cards? It’s gonna make a comeback I’m sure
Less content, that is spread across multiple instances that can have duplicate communities.
You just can’t keep doomscrolling here, the “active” search repeats all the time and the “best of the day” is like two pages.
And then there’s specific communities that just… Stayed on Reddit.
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??!!!?
