A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
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It does feel a little dead here. Right now it’s mostly memes, meta discussions, or Reddit hate. And the crowd is a very specific type of hyper aware internet dweller (myself included).
Reddit isn’t worth using without third party apps, and it’s the only social media I used before Lemmy, so I’m spending a lot more time off my phone nowadays. I only check the daily top on Lemmy once a day instead of compulsively every time I touch my phone. Guess that’s a good thing.
It does feel a little dead here.
This is also partly to blame on the sorting algorithm. There is an active PR to improve this https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3378 (Relevant issue: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3622)
I blocked the major meme subs (coms?) and my experience here has been much, much better. Free yourself of last year's memes and explore all the interesting links getting posted
Yes, those meme communities are very active and drown other posts from other communities. Unsubscribing them drastically improve my experience. I can sort by New now and see Posts from communities I subscribed to. And unlike Reddit, new posts got pretty good engagements here, perhaps because other people browse by New too.
"very active" meaning nonstop reposts of last year's top reddit memes by bots or humans acting like bots
I don't want Lemmy to be reddit 2.0
It's fine, memes also have their audience. I also blocked all of the communities, but to each their own
That's a very good thing.
And to be honest, as selfish as this will sound, I wouldn't want Lemmy to grow too much - unless the eternal september crowd can be contained.
I disagree. While I do like that the discussions and top level comments are not nearly as homogenized as Reddit eventually became, I’m really missing the niche communities. I wasn’t subscribed to any large subs on Reddit, so my feed was basically just a curated list of discussions for my hobbies. No memes, news, pop culture, internet drama, or politics. Right now, that’s just not possible on Lemmy due to the low population.
Give it time. Lemmy is still very fresh, but I'm confident smaller niche communities will keep popping up and it will eventually add up. Region and country locales seems to be doing well.
Understood. That's why I said:
I wouldn’t want Lemmy to grow too much
I think I get your point but from a larger perspective, Lemmy (amongst several others) is just a means to an end:
Free the internet of corporate control.
A steep goal but a worthy one if you ask me.
So I say make it grow as big as possible even if that means it is not as intimate as it is right now.
In a large federated place, there will be infinite amounts of smaller/niche hosts to migrate to.
The idea imo is that we need to focus on our goal here: stop the infinite brainwashing happening through mobile devices.
Feel free to disagree. Its just how I see it. Have a good one.
The sorting algorithm fixes can't come soon enough IMO. Small subs are dead because they simply can't show up on the front page with most of the sorting algorithms that Lemmy has. That limits how much you'll see in your feed and also makes Reddit a better product (due to all the niche subs it has that actually show up on the front page).
I think it's as you say. Lemmy's growth is going to happen in waves, until it has reached a critical mass that sustains its own "weight", in terms of growth.
You have to remember that this is no commercial platform, with little advertisement, which is made by its own users. Growth is bound to be slow, at first.
Not only that, we want it to be slow. Being a server admin at the moment is racing from fire to fire. The Lemmy software needs to mature a bit before it will be ready for the less-technical users.
According to the Fediverse Observer, Posts and Comments are still growing day-by-day. It's definitely slower growth, but as long as it stays healthy and active it will continue to have growth spurts as the enshittification of the rest of the web continues.
And the best thing at can do is post and comment to let people know we're active and alive!
What’s the rush? Rome wasn’t built in a day. If people are happy (enough) with it now it will grow with time and at the pace it should.
If things get too big too quickly then the cake will always collapse.
I like the amount of content here right now and things will diversify gradually over time.
Most people seem to forget their Reddit accounts were more than 8,9,10+ years old and a lot changed over that period.
Actually I like having a "smaller" space. Reddit was already way too big, with an anonymous giant blob of users. I wouldn't even have bothered writing an answer like I do now, since it would have been buried under 100s of other posts and comments within seconds. Sometimes smaller and slower are positive features, at least to me.
The only issue with the smaller space is the niche instances. One of the things I loved about reddit was finding communities for hobbies and interests. With something small you are sometimes lucky to have 20 people in an instance and then even less posting or engaging with content.
There is a sweet spot for platform size.
Too small? Only a few communities and you can’t find your hobbies.
Too big? The place is overrun by normies who treat the platform like Facebook (posting unironic old people memes) or Instagram (running scams and OnlyFans ads). It also might become too difficult to moderate or the admins could get greedy and their own and advertisers’ profits before user experience (enshittification). All of these are happening to Reddit BTW.
However, we are too far from the “too large” problems and Lemmy instances’ size is generally kept in check by popular recommendations (join-lemmy.org, awesome-lemmy-instances) favoring <1k communities. So I think pointing average Reddit users to Lemmy is more helpful than hurtful, and I designed and helped build this banner at r/place despite having otherwise left Reddit.
Honestly, I want half of the people on reddit... to just STAY on reddit.
There is a lot of toxicity that I don't want here....
That's fine. Just do our things here, and when Reddit eventually shoot their own foot again, the next wave of refugees will have an alternative ready, unlike us a few months ago where there was confusion over where to migrate.
Kind of lucky the Fediverse version of Reddit worked out as the main alternative while Mastodon and Bluesky duked it out and then Threads came out of nowhere.
Also IMO the Lemmy apps are better than Mastodon... I admit I was one of the people who got too confused to get on Mastodon but I figured out Lemmy just fine.
I'm pretty sure most of the people who will come here as a result of Reddit are already here. All the new Reddit refugees are probably getting over the hype with Lemmy/Kbin and are finally not pouring so much time into the platforms. And as a result, slowing growth numbers and tapering engagement. Its pretty natural and nothing to be worried about. There's still plenty of engagement here (just look at what happened to Threads a couple weeks after it came out).
Regardless, we should focus on making Lemmy/Kbin a fully fleshed out platform and draw in users the natural way rather than relying on Reddit falling off for new users. At this point in time, the Reddit blackout is pretty much over.
Might as well throw in my rant here, as I'm against this sentiment of not wanting Lemmy/Kbin to grow more and possibly even get mainstream. I get keeping out the undesirables of Reddit and other social media to prevent an Eternal September situation, but I also want more people of different backgrounds and interests rather than the same Reddit critic/tech enthusiast type of crowd. The great thing about federation is that if you want a smaller and more tight knit/topic centered community, there are smaller servers to join (not so much for Lemmy/Kbin at the moment since they are new, but it should get better over time). We can't seriously want Lemmy/Kbin to develop well if we voice desires to keep people out and rebuild echo chambers. Lots of smaller communities and topics have little activity because there's really only one group of people here right now.
Don’t know don’t care. There’s a community here now and it’s healthy.
Anyone who would've left Reddit has already done so, they may be a small increase when Boost/sync becomes available but I doubt we'll see much growth. No one has ever heard of Lemmy.
Nah, spez isn’t done with his halfwit ideas. Wait till they kill old.reddit
Don’t forget they are planning on going public and spez says they need profits. Profits generally come at the expense of pissing people off.
Wait and see.
This feels like a clickbait news article headline. Any headline with a leading question can usually be answered "no".
Lemmy, we, are not a corporation. In fact, exponential growth is BAD since the instance admins have to spend more money and work to keep it running. There is no financial benefit to chase the numbers. Let it grow organically.
It will always be like that. If 100 people come here for the first time on one day its great if 10 end up staying till the end of the week and lurking and out of those 10 maybe 1 would end up staying for longer. Thats just how these things work.
Don’t imagine for a second that Reddit is done pissing off its users. All it takes for lemmy to win is keep improving reliability and usability.
Yes, no, kinda.
(I am basing all this on these stats: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats)
First, the most detailed statistics show "Active Users Monthly". That means, if you have any interaction (e.g. posting a comment) you will be counted as active for a whole month.
If you have a look when the decline first started, you'll see that it's right around one month after the Reddit blackout.
So what happened is that tons of people came to Lemmy during the blackout, tried it out for a few minutes, maybe posted a comment, and then dropped it again. They were still counted in the statistics until the 12th of July, which is when the drop starts in the statistics, because all these "single-day-users" are dropping out.
But: the drop from the highest point to now is only ~10% of the users. Other than that the user count seems to be kinda stable.
For more up-to-date numbers look at the post/comment counts, since they are daily. Here you see a linear, maybe slightly more than that, increase, which indicates a steady amount of interaction.
Btw, the number of total users is steadily decreasing, and that's a good thing. The reason for that is that there are lots of obscure instances with a handful of active users but 10k-90k of users who have never posted anything. These instances usually have open registration without captcha, so all these users are probably bots.
Since these instances don't actually have real users or content, they probably were just created by someone to try something out, so they keep getting closed, and with them, the bot accounts disappear.
I think the growth is going fine. Just invite friends to Lemmy and share an app with them.
Old.lemmy and liftoff app is what got me to finally stay. I think more people would join if they knew about the site update and that there are a bunch of apps for it now. Originally it seemed to be just one app and it was terrible.
I think there are 2 groups coming from reddit. 1- Users wanting a more niche community (think early reddit) 2- Users trying to turn Lemmy into present day Reddit. Theres a good amount of communities that are carbon copies of reddit subs. Personally I think that reddit has morphed into something toxic (Ive had a reddit account for 15 years). While its good to have growth, nobody wants to use a site that is so popular that Aunt Betty is chiming in with her love jesus memes.
I see two big events in the coming weeks
Reddit said during the 3rd party app backlash that old.reddit is not going anywhere...
...so it’s dead in 6 months?
^(They^ ^reassured^ ^the^ ^Apollo^ ^dev^ ^of^ ^cooperation^ ^in^ ^2023-01)^
I think that ease of use is the biggest hurdle at the moment. While yeah Mastodon has grown it's also improved quite a bit. The onboarding is much more streamlined versus six months ago.
Those barriers are getting better but are still there for Lemmy. Apps are starting to come which is fantastic but the users need to want to engage with the platform. Streamlined sign up, improved features and UI improvements will need to continue to evolve in order to grow the user base.
If it doesn't, I'm okay with that. The level of engagement I have here is very satisfactory to me. Reddit could be way too overwhelming. That Lemmy is small is kind of refreshing.
I wouldn't call it a matter of need. While I want to see Lemmy grow, I don't think that we should rely on outrage on another platform to drive our own activity in the long term. While the number of users joining has slowed down, it certainly hasn't halted.
All we can do is make Lemmy as solid and enticing of a platform as possible, and leave those on Reddit to choose between supporting a platform they don't like and leaving. We shouldn't be responsible for forcing their hand, but we should be responsible for maintaining a healthy community here.
I think even something like a indie video game developer hosting a forum on Lemmy instead of Reddit would do wonders for making Lemmy "mainstream". Or even a youtuber, streamer, or some other content creator at that. But of course, it's not something I'd go out of my way to do; just something that I think will happen in due time.
One thing Lemmy is missing is a way to join that doesn't require you to understand the fediverse - currently the barrier of entry is quite high. Also, there aren't any great user interfaces yet, which makes the platform difficult to use.
If you build it they will come
I think we might follow mastodon's path, with a users spike with each reddit fuckup and then a plateau. But only time will tell.
I'm not naturally a poster I got tired of posting. I keep thinking of stuff to post while I'm at work then forget when I get home.
Many communities are getting larger though, I wonder why despite this ?
It will come in waves as Reddit would become worse and worse over monetization.
